WEBTOON
Accelerating growth | Product strategy and product & visual design
Role Duration
Product Design Intern Apr to Sept 2020
Team
Solo work aside from Pride Collection. Our team consisted of 1 PM, 2 designers (including me), 2 data analysts, and 3 programming editors.
Process
I had different deliverables over the course of this project so I chose not to organize this write-up by process, which generalized into the following:
1. Discover & define → research (past UXR's qualitative and quantitative data, gathered from online sentiment, in-app usage, and A/B testing)
2. Iterate → lo-fi mockups / rough draft
3. Deliver → final deliverables handed off to the appropriate team
Besides this, I also worked on the UI & UX for the WEBTOON mobile app. You can explore that work here.
Challenge
WEBTOON is a mobile & web platform in entertainment with 16.5+ million daily readers on the English platform (as of early 2021). Whether editorial, research, or design, all PRM interns were given the following challenge to work together on and solve during our internship:
How can we increase new user retention? Once this has been achieved, how can we increase overall readership?
Deliverables
Increased guidance for users
• Streamlined the design process via design templates for pop-up modal with series recommendations for new readers, who often reported feeling overwhelmed exploring the app for the first time
• Helped innovate a new use of WEBTOON's Collections feature to promote new Original series
• Led art direction for themed series collections (2020 Pride Collection and Ultimate Showdown 2)
Promotional web banner for 2020 Pride Collection— designs created via joint effort between me and senior designer Judith Park. Image from Mei, creator of the series Brimstone and Roses.
Optimized personalization
• Organized A/B testing of designs for specific audience segments based on their preferred genre, achieving higher click-through rate
• Analyze common design and copy patterns for key app components to identify causes for higher click-through rates
Ensured greater consistency in UX
• Redesigned components for in-app events with thousands of participants, enhancing their affordances and thus boosting series growth as part of a new feature roll-out
• Collaborated with Editorial to establish monthly promotion strategy for series
• Designed lo-fi mockups for series in need of a banner or a more up-to-date one to ensure visual consistency & quality, creating a more cohesive user experience
• Handed off mockups to Creative Marketing team, communicating directly with them to ensure quality of final product
Onto the next episode
At the time, most of my experience was purely in design. This was the first opportunity where I really engaged with product thinking and strategy, skills which I greatly enjoyed practicing and haven taken with me into every new project since.
Key takeaways from this project were:
💬 Feedback early and often is critical. Especially for projects with more deliverables, a few pivots, and often a tight timeline before going live. My design lead Jude and I had many, many review sessions that helped me improve my communication skills and ability to explain my design decisions.
💥 How to navigate differences in opinion between designers. This was another aspect of communication that I got to practice during these projects. Empathy is the key here.
