Growth for Buffer
Exploring many ways to bring more growth into Buffer including new pricing, better upsells and gentle nudges throughout the app. I was the lead designer in a new team put together to tackle growth at Buffer. Many of the projects were experiemental.
A new experimental team
A new team was put together to tackle growth at Buffer. Some of the projects were experimental and others saw through to production. I got to work as the lead designer on many initiatives including new pricing, better upsells, calls-to-actions and even a prototype for a whole new home experience.
Exploring new pricing
At the time, we wanted to introduce a brand new Essentials plan to Buffer. This would sit side-by-side with the current offering as a way for us to see how it would resonate. The first challenge was working out the details for the plan but also how we would try and make it known within the app as a good experiment. My first thought here was to introduce it in various places, including the existing pricing plans page. Using illustrations from our talanted brand designer, Julia, I wanted to explore how it could feel exciting and celebratory and visually make it appealing to click.
Discover, not sell
We needed space to better explain the plan, though, and it felt important to keep that within the app and not send people off to a marketing page. The idea here was to keep the discovery, learning and potential upgrade of the plan as quick and as seamless as possible. I explored a modal that would be triggered from any of the Essential plan notices within the web app and have it sit between the discovery and the upgrade. It had to be visually appealing and contain just enough information so the customer would know the benefits and feel it was a worthy upgrade.
Lauren Chilcote — Senior Designer at Webflow
“Thoughtful, inquisitive, and truly no-ego, James was a total dream to work with! He's got killer design instincts and cares deeply about good user experiences and improving his craft. A true creator at heart, he's always pushing himself to learn something new (photography! piano! creating design courses!). Not only is he a fantastic designer and skilled developer, he's an incredible human—one of the most warm, welcoming people I've ever worked with.”
Show what they're missing
As part of the upsells explorations, I mapped out all the current places where we were attempting to upself customers from the free plan to paid plans and found many were missed opportunties. We looked again at the onboarding process, the various paid features that we blocked, and looked at other opportuties like new popups and modals. It felt important to take care of the user experience here and make sure that any lesser plan still felt like a solid choice and that we were not just bombading people with upsell messages.
Cross-platform
We ended up continuing with this same idea, even on mobile, when explaining other new plans we were introducing like the Team Pack. It felt important to keep that bright, friendly visual style across the platforms. At the time, we were really doubling down on our Design System across web and mobile and that even including brand assets and illustrations as a core part of Buffer's new identity.
Another aspect of growth was a more experimental feature we were calling Home. This was a cross platform exploration with what mobile had as Get Started. The idea was that when a customer signed up to Buffer they were not just presented with a blank queue, which was the current experience at the time. We looked at providing useful jump off points that would be relevant and valuable to anyone new to Buffer which would hopefully get them to use Buffer to it's full potentail and then find natural reasons why they should then upgrade to paid.
Product Design
UX
UI
Prototyping
Figma
Strategy
