BitTorrent - Designing the online face of BitTorrent products
Description
I worked as an Interaction Designer for the web team at BitTorrent from July 2014 - April 2015. As part of the web team, I was able to work on almost the entire portfolio of products. Being the sole Interaction Designer on the team, I worked closely with several product managers, engineers, brand strategists and researchers to ensure that individual product goals are met and their representations were aligned with our brand vision. While at BitTorrent, I worked on several product sites, including the BitTorrent, µTorrent, BitTorrent Sync, BitTorrent Bundles and Bitmedia Network.
My Role
Design Research, Content Strategy, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Prototyping
Timeline
July 2014 - April 2015
Defining the Target Audience
In order to meet user expectations, it’s important to identify your target audience. For each of the projects, I sat down with the respective product managers, marketing managers to discuss user characteristics and observed behaviors via analytics. I then worked with our user research team to conduct user interviews to validate our assumptions and developed the web personas, thus ensuring that both marketing as well as product needs were met.
BitTorrent Website
At the time of working here, the biggest challenge with designing for the product was the lack of trust due to it's name being associated with content piracy. As a result, my main priority was warding off this stigma via design.
Key Design Activities:
- Comparative Analyses to assess strengths and weaknesses: Part of our reasoning to do this was to identify what attracts customers to services alternative to ours and what these competitor’s services provide that can be of use for us to implement into our own solution,
- Design Thinking workshops to align all teams including product, web and marketing to drive key decisions keeping the user in mind.
µTorrent
µTorrent is one of the world's most oldest clients, with a target audience of technology experts. Being one of the world's most popular torrent client comes with it's own set of advantages and disadvantages. with such a huge user base, even small changes needed to be made with caution as it can invoke strong reactions. While I was at BitTorrent, I was leading optimization efforts in order to get more downloads and revenue via the sale of µTorrent Pro client.
Key Design Activities:
- Conducting Research to outline True Value of Pro: We conducted interviews and did card sorting with over 20 users to understand what features of Pro appeal to them.
- Optimizing via A/B Tests: I worked very closely with our data analyst to run A/B tests to see the effect of small and big design changes on conversions. Together, we increased Pro orders through an A/B funnel test by 32%.
BitTorrent Sync (Now Resilio)
After being a consumer-facing company for a long time, BitTorrent launched their very first enterprise product in the form of BitTorrent Sync. It is a peer-to-peer file sharing service with a freemium model. Creating the end to end customer journey started with educating users about the product and ending with them purchasing the product or completing the checkout process.
Key Design Activities:
- Concepting and Content Strategy to Educate Users: Since Sync was a brand new product, it was important to educate users about it's benefits, without overwhelming users with technical details. I worked very closely with the product manager to fully understand how Sync works along with it's benefits so I was able to relay this via the website.
- Information Hierarchy to focus on Important Elements: With this site being the first point of contact for users, it was important to focus on the hierarchy of the pages as well as the content.
- Optimizing the Checkout Process: With Sync having a freemium model, another key metric for success was obviously, revenue. For this I worked with the marketing team and was able to design a flow where we could upsell the premium product without frustrating an user.
