Bravado Community
A 2022 end to end Product Design project. This case is still a work in progress.
Bravado Community
Context
Bravado is a company focused on helping salespeople succeed in their careers — from helping them landing a new job to offering a space where they can ask questions to a community, or share their learns, the Bravado Community. The community offered total anonimity to it’s members.
Salespeople need a space to be honest about how they feel about their work lifes. Choosing when to share ther real identity is part of that. But taking credits for the content they were creating was also important to their carrers.
Community optional anonymity
To learn and share with the community, users must be able to switch between identites whenever they want
It was strategic for the company that users could still not disclose their real identities when posting or commenting. At the same time, we wanted the members to be able to take professional credits on the content they create for the plataform. It should be very easy and accessible to create content with any identity at any moment.
Process overview
Company goal
The leadership wanted to engage new users in the Community using real identities instead of anonymous ones.
My approach
I proposed two approachs: (1) allow users to switch profiles in key interactions as commenting or (2) have some forums require real identities while others remain anonymous.
User testing
User testing showed both concepts were equally understandable and usable.
Final decision
We decided to allow users to switch profiles to perform specific interactions (approach 1). Ensuring enough content creation and enabling anonymous sharing for sensitive information.
Solution
I added the profile switcher nearby the interaction users will take, and established that we should save their last profile choice as the default
Most users don’t post or comment. It was not necessary to show a switcher to the “passive” users. Given our scenario, it was better to have shortcuts to switch nearby the interaction.
Why not…
When reading this case, you may wonder about some decisions. It’s important to remember that we were a startup and we had to move fast — there was no time to discuss many different versions, but I made sure to explore a few before deciding to pursue that one.
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Why not just allow people to “post anonymously” or not,
removing the need to switch?
The community's main profiles were anonymous profiles. We still needed to list the posts they wrote when under this pseudonym. As they could have shared private info, we should keep it that way.
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Why not separate the communities? If you want to be anonymous,
you have a forum. If you want to use a real identity, you have another.
This was the most explored idea, at least from my side. But, in the end, the company was not sure we’d have enough users to ensure the content would be created on more than one forum daily.
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Why not have a global switcher?
Even though this is common, the stakeholders were not confident that users would see and learn that switching profiles on the top-right of the page (for example) would change the profile they are commenting with
Final considerations
Switching profiles inside comment and post interactions could not be the ideal solution. But considering the resources and the timeline (three weeks to design desktop, mobile web, and app), it was a good tool to learn about the user’s reaction to the new feature.