Social Media Posts Coverage Rebrand
Role: Lead UX and Graphic Design
Client: Sky Sports News
Brief
Improve turnaround time along with the overall look.
Context
This started as a passion project when I first joined Sky Sports News. I came across our template for social media posts shown on air and we all in the department unanimously agreed that it was too bland and didn’t bring much harmony to our brand style. Not only that the template was quite inflexible when it came to layout of text and images as the posts tended to have a variation of image and text sizes.
Listening to these feedback I ventured on a rebrand with the purpose of it being inline with our primary brand while also being a flexible template catering to all styles of image and text.
Previous version before redesign
Below are the previous templates for Instagram and twitter posts going on air on the channel. The channel also did post Instagram stories but a solid template for that was not provided which lead to a quiet chaos.
Customer Journey Map
Insights into the journey of the post being assigned for design to being sent for broadcast.
Context
The designer has been sent an email for a social media post that needs to be designed and sent back to be broadcasted in 1 minute.
Goals and Motivation
Provide fast turnaround
Make sure the design is well balanced.
Research and pain points
Findings from research and pain points
Questions
Tell me about your experience using our current template for the design.
Have you encountered any issues when producing the graphic using our current method?
What has been the most difficult part during the process?
The research focused on interviews from designers who use the templates and producers who place them on air. The following were the major pain points accumulated from my findings.
Inflexible
The template used had a pre-boxed area for image placement which made image placement inflexible as the designer would either have to crop out the image from the post making the content less legible or add a blurred background behind to fill up the space which not only lead to a less clean frame but also added extra few steps for the process.White space
As shown below there were a number of cases when the lack of content resulted in a lot of white space which lead to a somewhat messy layout.Time constraint
This was a major pain point in the analysis as the information from the interviews showed that the nature of these posts are rapid (on average 5 social media posts needing designed and uploaded in 7 minutes) which made it even more imperative for there to be a solid template which not only cuts out on time needed to produce but also kept to the integrity of the brand.
SWOT Analysis
Trial and much error
Warning! Horrendous stills below but I promise it gets better.
When I initially began the design, Sky Sports News was also going through an update on their main brand. At the start I began the design with a too literal mindset, adding social media icons in the background linking to the actual social media platforms, while also looking into if the images and texts can be moved around for flexible approach. The outcome was a resounding no as the end result looked childish and messy which lead me back to the drawing board.
How it ended
At this stage the rebrand for the channel was complete and it really helped with polishing my concept. Instead of taking it too far, I stripped it down to our core colour palette which gave the content room to breathe. This also ticked off the flexible layout of image and text without compromising on the cleanliness as they could quite easily be resized and aligned to centre.
Feedback from designers using the template also showed an improvement of speed in delivery and ease in utilising the template so yay me!
Actions recorded from previous template
This was done to research a walkthrough on how the template was utilised and record the results of amount of tasks required to reach the goal. I found that in total it takes 17 steps to reach the end of the task the most time consuming of all being in regards to the image placement.
On average the time it took to create one post took 1 minute 16 seconds.
Actions recorded from new template
The new template not only eradicated the problem of incorporating images of different proportion but also reduced the number of steps from 17 to 14 to complete the task.
On average the time it took to create the same post took 58 seconds.
