Kayla Tam
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Moleskine Smart Notebook: Enhancing Product Value with Social Networking

Overview
This conceptual project involves a large-scale ecosystem and niche products. Given the time constraints and broad subject matter, my team focused on building a functional design of a new social networking feature.
2 Week Sprint
Team members: Bahar Abedi, Alexandria Palmer
My Role: Lead UX Designer (Research and Design), UI Design Support
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Google Sheets

Background Information

The Moleskine Smart Writing System consists of a Smart Notebook, a Bluetooth-enabled Smart Pen, and the Moleskine Notes App*. After writing or drawing with their Smart Notebook and Smart Pen, users can view, edit, and share their digitally converted creations on their phone or tablet. *I will refer to this as “the app” throughout this case study.

Goal

Our goal was to design a new social networking feature for Moleskine owners to enhance their experience sharing their work online.

Go to High-Fidelity Prototype
Research
Since the Moleskine Smart Writing System allows writing and drawing, we interviewed professional and casual artistic content creators. We asked creators about the social networking platforms they use and why they want to share their work.
Affinity Map from User Interviews
Click image to view in a new tab.
I discovered 3 main takeaways:
1. Content creators want to share their content effortlessly, quickly, and safely**
2. Users like finding new content and creators
 3.   Users will post on social networking platforms to show off their skills and work to potential clients
**minimizing chances for plagiarism, potential scams
In sum,
Professional content creators need a way to share their work quickly and easily
so they can connect and engage with other content creators and potential clients.
In response to this problem, how might we...
Successfully connect content creators together?
Design a quick way for content creators to discover new work opportunities?
Allow content creators to engage with new work opportunities effortlessly?
Ideation and Design
66% of our interviewees posted for professional purposes, so we designed a social networking experience for professional artists. We chose to design our feature for the iPhone since all of our interviewees used mobile versions of social networking platforms.
Competitive feature analysis for DeviantArt, ArtStation, and Instagram mobile apps.
Click image to view in a new tab.

We looked at other social networking platforms geared toward artists to figure out the essential features and pages we needed to build.

Our feature analysis showed us that we needed to create simple user experience with ample post customization and search personalization options.

We wanted our social networking feature to facilitate exposure and interactions between users, so I created 2 user flows:
Create a Post
Create a Post User Flow
Find and Message Another User
Find and Message Another User User Flow
Our proposed sitemap for the Social Networking Feature

Since we focused on enhancing the current app, I created this sitemap with the assumption that users would sign up and access the social networking feature through the current app’s dropdown menu.

Sketches
Rough Sketches for Page Layouts
Click to see all our sketches. I created the ‘Home Feed,’ ‘See Posts By’ and ‘Notifications’ sketches.
Wireframes
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes based on sketches
Click to view zoom in on our wireframes. I created the wireframes for ‘Finding and Messaging Another User’ and helped edit ‘Create a Post’ wireframes.
Testing and Iteration
We tested our mid-fidelity prototype with my usability test plan. Our users found the search personalization and post creation processes relatively easy and smooth. Based on their feedback, we improved our design in 2 ways:
We added a message status under message bubbles per user feedback.
Message Status
We opted for simpler icons that were more closely associated with the functions of our app's pages.
Confusing Icons
High-Fidelity Prototype

Next Steps

Finally, we tested our high-fidelity prototype with the same test plan. While all our users found post creation very easy, participants provided some suggestions for iteration:
1. Color Contrast
50% of users wanted higher color contrast between different elements
2. Sizing
50% of users wanted bigger buttons and posts in gallery, especially since seeing the images are key to grabbing attention.
3. Consistency
Users were confused because the ‘Apply Filters’ button was available in one menu, but absent in another similar menu.
4. Navigation
Users could not navigate out of the social networking feature to the regular Notes interface, aside from the “Post Creation” page
Resume
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