MUSE TRENDS
I am the Principal Product Designer of Ahalogy Muse since 2016 along side a team of 2 direct reports.
Muse Trends is a tool that tracks emerging trends from Facebook, Pinterest, and our own network of 10,000+ influencers. The data driven trends are used to improve engagement in content marketing. Some of the uses are editorial calendar planning, recipe creation, guiding campaign direction, and product development.
I've conducted user research for this product with a variety of techniques including JTBD interviews, Kano Studies, & NPS scores; to understand what the users (Social Media managers, Brand & Agency strategists, our Internal Client Service team) would hire our tool to do. Let’s dive into some of the key features:
TOP TRENDS
On the homepage we surface a snapshot of the top trends for the day. Using data we place groups of topic trends into different buckets (rising, falling, top 500). The user has the ability to filter by date and category.
TOPIC PAGE
When you click on a trend from the homepage or enter a search term you are taken to a topic page. The topic page displays popularity of the trend across time, top keywords for the topic, and a seasonality graph looking across four years of data to determine which months does the topic peak in popularity.
INSPIRED STORIES
Along with the data we display visual inspiration from our network of 10,000+ influencers for trends. We found in our JTBD research that brands/agencies don't 'hire trends' just for answering what content topic should I focus on, but also how should I create this content.
COMPARISONS
Users also have the ability to make comparisons between multiple topics. For example, if I work in the test kitchen of Sara Lee. I can compare different types of pies and understand that sweet potato pie peaks in September and apple pie peaks in November. Therefore I should plan to create a campaign of sweet potato pies in early fall and apple pies in late fall.
HOLIDAY TRENDS
Aside from answering what is trending for specific topics, we help Brand & Agency strategists come up with ideas for upcoming events and holidays. We also give suggestions when they should be in the planning phase and when the campaign should be live for the event.
PLANNER
Brand users gave feedback during user research that they would like to track trends over time and save visual inspiration to reference later. So we built planner. The feature was also used by our internal client service team to share trend ideas with our clients.
SNAPSHOT
Our Client Service team kept getting asked to provide trends for our clients to take into meetings to share. So we built Snapshot--a tool that enables our CS team to export trends.
We wanted the interactions to be very simple for our CS team so they didn’t have to spend a lot of time creating these trend reports. All they have to do is select stories & keywords from a topic page, add in some reasoning behind why they selected the trend, and it generates an aesthetically pleasing looking pdf.
We wanted the interactions to be very simple for our CS team so they didn’t have to spend a lot of time creating these trend reports. All they have to do is select stories & keywords from a topic page, add in some reasoning behind why they selected the trend, and it generates an aesthetically pleasing looking pdf.
Note: this product is both a trend tool and an influencer marketing platform. Click here to view the influencer marketing platform side of Muse.
