Helping social media influencers sell more products faster

Problem

Content creators had trouble finding products to recommend on Narrativ´s affiliate marketplace. They might spend minutes or hours researching products with Narrativ´s chrome extension. If this were not bad enough often the product they wanted to promote was not available for a commission. This caused not only frustration, loss of time, but also loss of income for them and trust in Narrativ.

My Role

As Lead Designer, I managed the complete redesign process. I handled stakeholder alignment, led our first usability tests, defined success metrics, and ensured the extension complemented our other products.

Process

Navigating stakeholder priorities

My first step was understanding everyone's needs and expectations. I met with our CEO, CPO and Product Owner to untangle competing priorities and technical constraints.

The dev team had built a basic prototype, but we needed real creator feedback. This introduced my first challenge - Narrativ had never conducted formal usability testing before, so I needed to establish the entire process.

Building our first research program

I pushed for proper user testing despite initial hesitation:

• Created a business justification for participant incentives
• Partnered with Customer Success to find suitable creators
• Scheduled 6 participants (4 actually showed up)
• Designed and facilitated testing sessions
• Documented findings for stakeholder review

feedback revealed clear creator pain points:

• Uncertainty about which products offered commissions
• Unnecessarily lengthy discovery workflows
• Disconnection from their content creation process

Implementing practical solutions

I worked within the constraints of the existing prototype and Chrome's technical limitations to:

• Streamline the product discovery flow
• Create unmistakable visual indicators for commission eligibility
• Develop consistent patterns with our soon-to-launch mobile app

The timing complicated things - we were simultaneously finishing a mobile experience. I had to balance platform-specific requirements while maintaining a unified design language across products that would launch just a week apart.

Results

The redesigned extension made a meaningful difference:

• Reduced product discovery from 5 minutes to 2-3 minutes
• Created consistency between extension, mobile and desktop
• Established foundation for future partner promotions
• Rebuilt creator confidence in our platform

My Impact

Setting research standards

This became Narrativ's first structured usability testing initiative. I built everything from scratch - recruitment approach, testing protocols, documentation methods. The process became our model for future research.

Unifying the product experience

Despite challenging timelines and different technical requirements, I created visual and interaction consistency across the Chrome extension, mobile app, and desktop experience. Creators could now move between platforms without confusion.

Driving measurable impact

I identified time-to-completion as our primary success metric, allowing us to quantify the value of our design changes. The 40-60% time reduction validated both the design approach and the investment in research.

Challenges & Insights

Working on this project, I faced several obstacles:

1. Chrome's extension framework limited certain design approaches
2. Coordinating with the parallel mobile app development created timeline pressure
3. Introducing stakeholders to usability testing required education and advocacy

What made this project succeed was getting key stakeholders involved in the testing process. By having our CEO observe sessions firsthand, I secured executive support that made future UX initiatives easier to champion.

The extension redesign established a more creator-centric approach to product development at Narrativ, with roadmap plans for partner promotional integration and smarter product recommendations based on previous referral patterns.