While at Venuelabs, I worked directly with the CTO to create a new product, AboutLocal, that would have a price point for every business owner. Because it is a B2B product for professionals, many of its users would be sitting at their work desks while using the product. However, many had jobs that kept them out of the office for most of the day so we made AboutLocal fully responsive so users could always be up-to-date on the activities in their stores.

To create these personas, I identified which of our existing or users of Venuelabs would be the best match for AboutLocal. The percentages over the photo represents what percent of our current user base that persona represents.

Here is a basic site map/user flow I did to figure out how free content could relate to the paid content and when a user would need to be logged in. We wanted our site to have content available to users who didn't have an account so that they could see the value of the product before purchasing.

Here is an early wireframe of our AboutLocal landing page, where users could discover free content and learn about the product offerings. They could see industry content in order to understand the value before signing up and paying to see content from their own customers.

The core of the product is here on the streams page. A stream is a collection of user feedback in the form of tweets, instagram and facebook posts. It's shown above as a circle on the stream index page. On hover a slideshow shows the 5 most recent posts in the stream. Free streams are provided to customers based on what they have selected or what is relevant to their industry. Examples of paid streams include customer complaints at a user's own store, individual store locations, and competitor content.

Clicking into the stream allows you to scroll through the content with an elegant fade-in loading animation.

The minimal design allows the content to stand on its own by keeping the interface and site language as simple as possible. The site is made intuitive and fun to through the use of subtle transitions, fades and an occasional pop of color. When new content is available a notification appears in turquoise over the feed image.

Posts can be shared easily via email. Sharing is available during both major decision points, while hovering over post, or when viewing the post in a modal. After the post has been shared, a dogear with an icon appears, reminding you who you sent it to on hover. Multiple addresses may be shown.

Example use case: CEO forwards a negative facebook post that requires a response by their social media manager.

Saving a post allows for easy categorization. Posts are saved to collections. Like sharing, saving is available during both decision points, while hovering over post, or when viewing the post in a modal.

Clicking on "Create new collection" exposes text field. After naming the new collection the user saves changes by clicking the "Create" button, which then animates into a checked circle. Super simple.

Users can share entire streams with coworkers, giving them access to the content. The share stream button is easy, intuitive, and follows the user no matter how deep they've gone into their content.