Growth for Buffer
I was the lead designer in a new team put together to tackle growth at Buffer. Many of the projects were experimental.
Company
Buffer
Role
Lead Product Designer
Skills
UX · UI · Prototyping · Figma · Strategy
A new experimental team
A new team was put together to tackle growth at Buffer. Some of the projects were experimental and others made it through to production. I got to work as the lead designer on many initiatives including new pricing, better upsells, calls to action and even a prototype for a whole new home experience.
There were lots of explorations covering upsells, pricing and onboarding
Exploring new pricing
At the time, we wanted to introduce a brand new Essentials plan to Buffer. This would sit side by side with the current offering as a way for us to see how it would resonate. The first challenge was working out the details for the plan, but also how we would make it known within the app as a worthwhile experiment. My first thought was to introduce it in various places, including the existing pricing plans page. Using illustrations from our talented brand designer, Julia, I wanted to explore how it could feel exciting and celebratory, and visually appealing enough to click.
Seeing if we could introduce a new plan next to our older ones
Discover, not sell
We needed space to better explain the plan, though, and it felt important to keep that within the app rather than send people off to a marketing page. The idea was to keep the discovery, learning and potential upgrade path as quick and seamless as possible. I explored a modal that would be triggered from any of the Essentials plan notices within the web app and sit between the discovery and the upgrade. It had to be visually appealing and contain just enough information for the customer to understand the benefits and feel it was a worthwhile upgrade.
We introduced a modal designed to be engaging and a way to learn about the new plan
Cross-platform
We ended up continuing with this same idea, even on mobile, when explaining other new plans we were introducing, like the Team Pack. It felt important to keep that bright, friendly visual style across platforms. At the time, we were really doubling down on our design system across web and mobile, and that even included brand assets and illustrations as a core part of Buffer's new identity.
We explored bringing over the same ways to learn about plans to mobile
Show what they're missing
As part of the upsell explorations, I mapped out all the current places where we were attempting to upsell customers from the free plan to paid plans and found that many were missed opportunities. We looked again at the onboarding process, the various paid features that we blocked, and other opportunities like new popups and modals. It felt important to take care of the user experience here and make sure that any lower-tier plan still felt like a solid choice, and that we were not just bombarding people with upsell messages.
A new experimental area called Home that would serve as an onboarding experience for customers
No place like home
Another aspect of growth was a more experimental feature we were calling Home. This was a cross-platform exploration inspired by what mobile had as Get Started. The idea was that when a customer signed up to Buffer, they would not just be presented with a blank queue, which was the current experience at the time. We looked at providing useful jump-off points that would be relevant and valuable to anyone new to Buffer, which would hopefully get them to use Buffer to its full potential and then find natural reasons to upgrade to a paid plan.
Dashboard for Ghost
The redesign of the dashboard for Ghost that brings in a brand new experience with richer analytics and a better home experience.
Analytics for Buffer
The design and build of a brand new product offering under the Buffer umbrella which went on to make over two-million dollars per year.
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