SETTING THE STAGE

Patreon was created in 2013 by Jack Conte, a YouTube musician who needed a better way to earn a living through his passion. It turns out that a lot of artists share this problem, and over the past 5 years Patreon has grown as an increasingly popular way for creatives to monetize their work. It provides artists (creators) the unique opportunity to both build relationships with their fans (patrons) and receive funding in exchange for exclusive content. 

Brief: I was tasked with adding a feature to the mobile Patreon app for a concept project that would allow creators to internally market and promote their work.

My role: user research & interviews | wireframing | prototyping & testing

Scope: team of four | duration of two weeks

Tools: Sketch | InVision | Procreate | Trello

RESEARCH

An important early distinction I found with Patreon is that there are in fact 2 separate groups of users:

• Creators who use the platform for income

• Patrons who use the platform to support creators and obtain exclusive content

Using guerrilla recruiting, I was able to interview 15 different Patreon creators to get a feel for their impression on the platform.

I conducted separate interviews with a mix of podcast, music, and art enthusiasts to gather qualitative data on the patron/subscriber side of the user experience.

After synthesizing our 20+ user interviews with several affinity diagram configurations, I crafted three user personas based on recurring themes.

RECURRING THEMES

While the creator community was certainly passionate about Patreon as a platform, there were 3 common complaints about its current state:

• An extremely limited and frustrating search function

• Creators who do not have strong social media presence outside of Patreon have a much harder time with discoverability

• The current platform hosts a huge list of different features and integrations, but knowing which to use and how is difficult for users

These initial findings prompted several questions to answer in ideation and design:

• How might we design to help convert The Tentative Subscriber into a patron?

• How might we improve discoverability for The Introverted Illustrator?

• How might we implement these elements without disrupting the culture of a platform that worked for The Optimistic Creator?

SKETCHES & IDEATION

I wanted to create a look and feel that would be familiar to users and allow for intuitive navigation and discovery. It was important that users would be able to search for a specific artist, but also browse freely based on creator categories and other common filters.

EVOLUTION OF DISCOVERY

I developed a discover page as the center of navigation for the app, and it was refined through several stages of user testing.

By focusing on exploration and discoverability, I was able to address the issue of the frustrating search function on the existing app.

User testing showed that this unintuitive search feature was hurting both patrons and creators. Patrons like The Tentative Subscriber were less likely to commit to donations if it was difficult to find their desired creator, and were less likely to browse to discover other creators.

For creators like The Introverted Illustrator, a poorly developed search function meant they were even less likely to be discovered and grow their fan base.

CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE

Patreon’s current platform is very difficult to navigate unless you know the exact name of the artist you are looking for. Browsing the app without a specific artist in mind is difficult, unintuitive, and hurts creators without a large established audience.

I designed this prototype with a landing page that encourages users to browse, and with category filters that would promote the discovery of different kinds of creators.

TAKEAWAYS

• I was originally tasked with designing an internal marketing strategy for creators. However, based on user testing and interviews with actual creators and patrons, a redesign of the current app for improved discoverability made more sense as a priority for the platform. It would solve one of the biggest issues with the current app, and help patrons and creators alike.

• Through multiple iterations I was able to arrive at a foundation for an app with a familiar and intuitive interface for discoverability.

NEXT STEPS

• To validate the prototype with Patreon users and continue the iteration process.

• The focus on exploration could be further improved through curating more personalized discovery content.