Courage Egbude

🌍 Socialverse

Intro

SocialVerse is the place to watch vlogs, documentaries, and podcasts in the native mobile format. Connect with creators, increase your attention span, and earn crypto tokens along the way. With an embedded crypto wallet we give you access to the new web3 frontier.

Timeline

Nov 2021-July 2022

Role

UI Design, Branding, Prototyping. Product. I worked with the lead designer, product manager and engineers

Problem Statement

Today Social Media users and creators are disconnected from the ability to earn and have ownership from their input to the platform and instead are treated as another income stream. On top of that user data is collected, hidden from the user, and sold to further mine profits.

Goals

From a consumer side the algorithm that the user fed content from is behind a walled garden, with the user being unable to make changes to it which develops a toxic relationship between the platform and the user. We have hopes for ourselves to make changes and there is a lack of consumers having control over the algorithms that feed us content. Instead, the algorithm focuses on what enrages the user and keeps them most engaged on the platform, rather than what is most healthy and best for them to live a positive, happy, and healthy life.

We had 3 major goals for this project.

Give users control over the type of content they want to rather than an algorithm that is toxic.

Users and creators have the ability to earn and have ownership over their input to the platform

Create a community of web 3 enthusiasts that are driving a change in the decentralized world

Research

A lot of the research was carried out by the UX Research team that collaborated with the various social media influencers to understand their needs and meet their expectations after proper research was carried out this data was then sent to the design team to convert into solutions.

To create a system that works, we needed to understand how the web 3.0 and blockchain would thrive in the social media world, we also reach out to top influencers from web 2.0 platforms listening to their complaints and suggests, also onboarding a few to the project to work directly with us.

How can users earn and create on content that they love?

What recent trends have led users to fall out with current web 2 platforms?

Identify ways to provide clear content without toxic algorithms?

Solution

From the insight gotten, we decided to focus on a network approach to develop a decentralized system that is accessible to members and relevant stakeholders, Build a community and Establish Frameworks for creating experiences, and giving control back to the users.

It became clear that there was a missing spot for long format vertical videos in the market as creators had to film separate content for a platform, and drive all their own traffic to great content they made.

Implementation

The visual design was centered around creating a delightful experience for Socialverse users. The High-fidelity screens also established a realistic experience to encourage useful stakeholder feedback and interactive usability tests.

Conclusion

After interviewing over 50 creators with a combined following of over 350 million followers (that’s more people than there are in the U.S.) The positive feedback was overwhelming and feedback for new features invaluable. Original the idea was based on web2, however it became clear that web3 would solve a lot of the problems currently had on the existing platforms. Using the data gotten from user research to improve the product experience by 50%

Some next steps to be taken would include an internal wallet into the application and creating a custom token for the application users as a form of digital currency within the application.