Before I started working on solutions to improve the Neighbor Post page, it was important for me to do an analysis of the current state of the page in order to identify the most important issues that needed to be addressed in a new version. I created the Miro board below to document this process, as well as streamline the collaboration process of working with a handful of PMs. As you review the board you will see, from left to right, the Intro statement, the current state analysis, early exploratory work, a first iteration (limited included features to due to small engineering team), and some examples of things we wanted to include in a future state.

The social content cards are naturally the main critical component on the Neighbor post feed page. Along with restyling these content cards overall, an important feature we decided to include were category chips (i.e. “for sale,” “announcement,” etc). Increasing the overall scannability of the posts on this page was a priority—and having a small indicator on top of each post indicating the intention of the post was a good start in achieving this.

I also did some exploratory work to showcase the idea that specific category cards should have different inputs and formats to accommodate their unique needs (i.e. the "for sale" category requires different inputs than an "announcement" type post). Explore the Figma below to see all of the states worked through to accommodate all of the categories types, which was particularly useful for handoff to the engineering team:

In addition to thinking about the content cards on the Neighbor post page itself, these cards needed to be displayed within the context of the homepage as well. However, a new limitation was introduced—the cards on the homepage couldn’t be interacted with. I had to figure out a way to make that clear for the user, while still showcasing social proof and activity to make someone want to click to view more. As shown below, I decided to:

• Create conditional logic to show the higher activity for each post (likes or comments), in order to make each post look more active
• Add real user images to the likes and comments reaction bar, to make each post feel more 'real' and make the overall page feel more personal and ‘alive'

Regarding the actual social experience on the page, I wanted reading and interacting with each post to be a more intuitive experience. Since the 'feel' of the page is directly tied to how the social activity is showcased, I knew redefining the reply logic was an important thing to get right.

The first step in this process was tweaking the format of the replies section to align a bit closer to what people have come to expect as per other social media sites. I slightly indented the first comment, as well as spaced the following replies in a way that properly showcases the order of who is replying to who. I also:

• Limited the replies to a max of three tiers (1. comment on original post, 2. reply to the first comment, 3. reply to the reply of the first comment). Before, this logic was endless and hard to follow.
• Added a automatic user tag functionality so when someone replies to another user’s comment, the original commenter gets automatically tagged, and will receive a notification when you reply. This was done to try to encourage more social activity.
• Added a user’s location to their comment if their home Patch was outside of the Patch location they were commenting within, as we wanted to make it clear when a user wasn’t local to the area they were commenting within.
• Added a highlight to the comment a user was replying to, to make it extra clear who they were responding to—this was important in increasing overall usability and accessibility as well.

Review the Figma below to see a sneak-peek of both desktop and mobile reply experiences:

On top of all of these additions, there was a lot of work that went into figuring out the optimal character count to truncate a comment, conditional states for when it made the most sense for when the “View previous replies” button was to appear, as well as defining when to actually show the reply box as well and when not to—in order to strike a balance between users reading the comments and encouraging them to write one themselves.

The Neighbor Post feed page on Patch has a rather lackluster history, as you can see in the version on the left, the page is reminiscent of a 1990s forum. Not only did the page get a much needed facelift, some important improvements were made:

• To make the feed experience easier to navigate and to start familiarizing users with full range of post categories, we added filters on top—without this feature, the only way to navigate the page is to scroll through a random smattering posts that may or may not be what a user cares about
• To encourage more post activity, we made the "Create a post" button more prominent by putting it at the top of the page
• While we refreshed the aesthetics of the social content cards themselves, in order to improve the scannability of the cards, we added a category chip to each. If a post is in the "For sale" category for example, it is much easier to identify that with category chips via scanning rather than having to read the entire post first to understand the post's intention
• To encourage more community activity, we honed in on the user engagement experience: refining the user reply logic to make the experience of responding to a post more seamless, while also showcasing more social activity

While many of these changes may seem like no-brainers, they weren’t simply rooted in personal preference. Every quarter, we ran UX Benchmarking tests with a series of users to measure the performance of different parts of our site over time. Over time we consistently received feedback that pushed us to make the above series of changes a priority; particularly, improving the usability of the page, the scannability of the content cards, and encouraging more real user activity. See some of the qualitative feedback that we leaned on to craft our suggested changes:

The original Local Business page, as you can see below, has very limited functionality in terms of discovering actual Patch businesses. Not only was the page redesigned to align with Patch's new design guidelines and formatting, some important functionality improvements were also made to reprioritize Patch businesses:

Review the Figma below to see a both the desktop and mobile screens in more detail, as well as see other related screens, including the Thumbtack search page, and an other conditional states:

The idea for Patch Business Pro came out of necessity after evaluating the current Patch business offering and realizing free businesses on Patch weren't understanding the value of upgrading to become a featured business on Patch. With Patch Business Pro, I worked to summarize the main benefits of upgrading a business on Patch, so that users could understand all the perks included in order to ultimately increase the number of paid businesses on Patch. See the new marketing pages below:

The first priority of implementing Patch Business Pro on the platform was to make it super easy to sign up for. Knowing this, I decided to make some key decisions when creating the sign-up flow:

• Placed sign-up CTAs during intuitive moments for the user, i.e. prompting a user to learn more about Patch Business Pro right after they successfully created a free business listing
• Created a universal marketing page for Patch Business Pro with all of the benefits described in detail and a simple CTA of "Upgrade now"
• Removed all unnecessary friction by taking the user right to the "Review your order" screen, while handling multiple required inputs like the ability to add additional communities
• Once successfully upgraded, the business will then receive CTAs that encourage them to take advantage of the perks they are now paying for (i.e. "Get your custom article") 

You can review the Patch Business Pro sign-up flow shown below:

Review the Figma below to the full scope of the flows with all screens involved, for both mobile and desktop.

Want to try the actual prototype I made for user testing? Click below to go through the process of creating a business listing on Patch, signing up for Patch Business Pro, and even creating a custom business article:

Want to try the actual prototype I made for user testing? Click below to go through the process of creating a business listing on Patch, signing up for Patch Business Pro, and even creating a custom business article:

One of Patch's most valuable and therefore profitable pages is the Event's page, as many communities love seeing what's going on in their community. The Executive team took note of this and decided it was important to distinguish featured events from free events even more, in order to encourage more people to feature their free events. This, paired with the need to align the old events page with the new brand guidelines, served as the mission statement for the Events workshop, in which I suggested some new ideas, described below.

Some key ideas from the suggested redesign:

• The old version of the Events page only allowed users to filter events by date, which I thought was lacking functionality, so I suggested adding a filter for event category as well as distance away—framing it up top as a main action a user can take to find the types of events they are interested in
• A new section dedicated to featured events would give featured events additional real estate on the page, providing more visual value to distinguish from free events who don't get the same visual treatment or placement (no images, and always below featured events)
• New category specific sections (i.e. Music and concerts, Social activities) can be personalized based on the users interests and also offers another opportunity to highlight featured events first, in a more specialized way
• I reformatted the linear events sections as well (i.e. Events happening today, Events happening this week), adding a special visual treatment to the featured events to make them pop a bit more, as well as focusing on improving the scannability of the rowed events cards overall
• "Curated collections" was another idea I had that tied together Patch's main bread and butter, articles, with its second most popular offering, events—these "collections" served as new piece of content that were centered around curating a bunch of events based on a popular theme to drive more engagement (i.e. "Best Fall Activities for the Whole Family")
  • These also provide an additional place for featured events to be showcased in a relevant way to the user

Check out the Figma below to review the screens in more detail and to see additional related mockups:

See all desktop screens involved in more detail below: