Suggested Hashtags
NDA Note: Certain details may have been omitted or modified to honor confidentiality agreements.
Brief
About Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management platform that helps businesses streamline their social media efforts through tools for publishing, analytics, engagement, and customer care.
Situation
In an effort to achieve business goals of acquiring large-size customers, Sprout Social looked for opportunities to better streamline content creation workflows for customers with large social media marketing teams. Prior to this project, customers used external tools and platforms to discover, and input hashtags for their social media posts.
Task
As the primary designer, my goal was to leverage cross-discipline collaboration and user and competitor research to design an in-app solution to suggest hashtags and provide a workflow to more easily add hashtags to social media posts.
Actions
I leveraged the following to ensure a solution that accomplishes user goals:
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Conducted competitor research to establish familiar interaction patterns
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Conducted user research to discover hashtag management behaviors
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Collaborated with the Data Science team to determine feature prioritization
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Used existing design system components to create new components
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Conducted usability testing for final designs
Results
The Suggested Hashtags feature in Compose provided Sprout Social customers more incentive to increase time spent in the Sprout Social app and decrease context-switching and friction during post creation workflows.
Research - Discovery - Internal
To identify the best research strategy, I first analyzed customer behavior and insights on hashtag workflows. With a suggested hashtags feature already in the mobile app, Mixpanel data on mobile usage served as the research baseline.
Top hashtag usage by network for Sprout posts:
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Instagram Business
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YouTube
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TikTok
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LinkedIn Company
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Twitter
“It’s an awesome hashtag tool, Hashtag Expert…It's great. You put in… like what kinds of things you're interested in or what you're looking for. And then it uses AI and it populates hash tags around that subject."
- Customer
“I'm using a platform on my iPhone. It's called Hashtag Expert. So literally, I just go in and I punch in ‘Madeline’...and it gives me 30 generated super top level, mid level, and low level hashtags for ‘Madeline’.
- Customer
Research - Discovery - Market
In my competitor research, I looked to the following apps:
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Native Apps: TikTok, Instagram, Twitter
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Competitors: Later, Loomly
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Hashtag generators
Here are notable features found across competitors:
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Suggest hashtags based on post content
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Compare hashtags usage by using real-time engagement data
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Ability save past hashtags, group hashtags, and create new hashtags
Research - Discovery - Customer
I conducted customer interviews with enterprise and mid-size clients, identified through the Customer Relations team and support tickets, to understand their hashtag discovery and management workflows.
Results
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Hashtags selections should be intentional.
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Users should be able to easily access frequently used hashtags associated with their brands
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Users should be able to gain insight as to whether the hashtag has increased reach and/or discoverability
“On Tik Tok, the real reason we are using hashtags is to reach those audiences who are searching for those terms”
- Customer
"...I'm trying to sort of… like gain some street cred with my work with other people who are doing work that I also appreciate and think as a certain level, you know, I'm trying to have conversations with those people and… you know, have a community with where I'm trying to go..."
- Customer
Decisions From Research
Here were the following decisions made based on discovery research, data science and engineering capabilities and timeline of the project:
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The MVP release will only include recently used hashtags and Instagram hashtag search.
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Showing the amount of usage per hashtag within Sprout and engagement metrics per hashtag will require a hashtag database.
Design Iterations
Global Search
Adhering to existing design patterns in Compose, I designed the experience to exist in a menu that opens with the “#” icon. This experience included a search bar to search for hashtags relevant to post content.
Version 1: Tabs
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Allowed users to easily find trending hashtags
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Allowed users to filter to more niche hashtags
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Clearly differentiated the different types of hashtags provided
Version 2: Modal
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Users can view more contextual data for each hashtag
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Tabs allowed for a scalable design for future hashtag features
Version 3: Nested Actions
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Designs were aligned with existing UI patterns in the Sprout Social app.
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Users could more clearly view network-specific hashtags and trending details.
Typeahead
Because of the challenges and engineering limitations discovered in my initial designs, I later explored a typeahead pattern similar to other tagging actions in Sprout Social’s caption field.
Usability Testing
Because both the typeahead experience and menu experience addressed goals for the MVP of the feature, I conducted customer interviews for usability testing.
Here are some notable results:
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Users are not likely to use hashtags across networks.
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All users recognized the icons for network specific hashtags and recent hashtags.
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All users preferred the global search (menu) experience for Suggested hashtags over typeahead
"I like how you could actually search things on there. So I guess just with how my brain works...and it might be just like a creature of habit sort of thing, but that's kinda the way I do it in Instagram now anyways or on TikTok.”
- Customer
"...if I were publishing to like Twitter or LinkedIn, the type ahead suggestions would be really helpful because it's just kind of…more passive…I think for Instagram and TikTok, the search suggestions would be more helpful especially with TikTok because it's like… when we make a video or something you still wanna be able to search within your realm of content versus only specifically to what that video is about."
- Customer
Final Design
Despite usability results indicating a preference for a global search (menu) experience, platform and engineering limitations and changes in ownership of the project led to the selection of the typeahead experience. You can learn more about the Suggested Hashtags feature in Sprout Social's Help Center.
Reflection
Here were some key challenges that arose during the project:
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The project changed hands between three Product Managers across different teams, causing communication challenges due to unclear ownership. Proper documentation was needed to ensure each new team had the necessary context to continue with the project.
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Limited access to network-specific hashtag data significantly impacted implementation of the designs. Feature prioritization was key to ensuring an MVP that accomplished user goals.
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There were conflicting stakeholder opinions regarding interaction design. Cross-discipline collaboration and communication was key to make sure everyone was aligned with design decisions.
Despite these challenges, the final release of suggested hashtags streamlined customers’ post creation workflows because they were grounded in customer insights.