Content Creator at Ponderly
During my time as a content creator, I made various contributions to improving Ponderly, an app hybrid of user generated content and author curated content. Furthermore, for the duration of the internship, I worked on many assignments as I had to hold many roles for our small intern team such as email campaigning, UX designing, and conducting research.
Project Goals
The general goals of the project were to,
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Increase user engagement and downloads with the app.
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Improve the user experience of the app.
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Promote app's content and articles to a broader audience on other platforms.
Overview
During my 3 months at the startup company Ponderly, I honed my skills in user experience and research to help improve the app's development. I took on many responsibilities as a content creator by creating email campaigns, conducting research, conducting bug testing on the website and app, and much more.
Role
I worked alongside 5-6 other interns who held similar responsibilities as me which really helped with balancing and working quickly. We had weekly meetings where we updated management and the founder of our progress and suggestions for future direction of the app.
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Since we were a small group, I wore many hats and held many responsibilities such as,
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Analyzing the website and app for functionality issues and providing solutions to fix the issues.
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Wireframing and prototyping mockups for the app and images for the app store.
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Conducting competitor research to evaluate Ponderly’s strengths, weaknesses, target audience, trends, and more.
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Drafting email marketing campaigns for a contest and newsletter.
Project
Assignments
I worked on various tasks like doing competitor research, UX design for wireframes, and an instructional modal for the app using Canva. I completed other tasks such as:
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Developing taglines
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Creating email marketing campaigns in MailChimp
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Proofreading email drafts
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Conducting SEO research
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In an effort to keep the case study simple, I will highlight my processes for 4 assignments I liked the most.
Example 1 - Creating App Wireframes
For this assignment, I was tasked to create a few wireframes to show a demonstration of how the app could look in a future update. We discussed frequently the different ways the app could improve its user experience and I came up with some of my own designs coupled with the team's discussions.
Both images show wireframes of the homepage for iPhone and Android. At the time, we decided that separating the user-generated posts, Ponderly articles, and 'My Pond' showing the user posts from people they follow.
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The general idea was to include a carousel feature to keep related content together and reduce clutter in the nav bar on the bottom of the screen.
For the content, I tried to keep it simple and understandable like how Ponderly's competitors have their UI layout. I wasn't a big fan of a gaming or trivia for the platform but I included it as a way to increase user engagement with the app.
Though I don't believe they're moving forward to work this into development, however it was interesting to create wireframes for an app to be seen by thousands of users. Though it's minor, I figured out how Canva is a versatile platform that I can use in the future to create wireframes or mockups.
Example 2 - Instructional Guide
In this assignment, I used Canva to develop a brief instructional guide that would be shown as a modal once the user starts using the app for the first time.
Creating the instructions were a bit tricky to do since the directions should be short and simple. For a quick modal, I tried to keep the instructions to 6 steps.
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For the first page, this was done to show management the steps and have 2 separate edits in case if one was better.
On the rest of the slides, I tried to demonstrate how the user would view the steps one at a time. I believe including an image would be helpful or simply having the UI highlight the icon that applies to the action for clarity.
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For the theme, it would make sense to use Ponderly font however there wasn't an exact style guide so I had to match the colors as best as I could.
Though my internship ended before I could see the end result, they pushed the idea to the development team. So, hopefully in the future this modal can be used as a way to introduce new users to Ponderly.
Example 3 - Competitor Research and SWOT Analysis
In this example of another assignment, I conducted competitor research and a SWOT analysis on direct competitors in the social media such as Instagram, X, Reddit, and more to learn their successes and threats.
This was my first time conducting competitor research and SWOT analysis. I also used ChatGPT to help guide me in the research process.
Overall, it was interesting using my background knowledge and quality testing of Ponderly to assess where it could improve compared to competitors.
Example 4 - Email Marketing Campaign for Ponderly Contest
For this assignment, I used MailChimp to create an email marketing campaign for current users to enter to win a $100 Starbucks gift card by sharing their favorite articles. The premise was to increase Ponderly's social media presence and boost engagement with the app.
For the email campaign, I,
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Made the tone and wording simplified to ensure the user understands the message.
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Added an eye-catching message about the contest and grand prize in a big heading font with a matching image to clarify the purpose to the audience.
Additionally, I,
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Added bullet points to make important points easy to skim and memorize.
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Bolded some of the text to highlight special deadlines or specifications for the contest entry.
This is a campaign that they're still working on however this was initial rough draft to help them get started on advertising their contest to their thousands of users and to help recruit new users as well.
Retrospective
The experience was insightful since I got an understanding of what working in the app development space is like and the competitiveness that comes along with it. Every week there was a meeting, even if I didn’t think there needed to be one, I still had to attend; another useful insight to what my career field could potentially look like especially if I work in the corporate world.
Additionally, I found myself wanting to stick to the research and design tasks since I enjoyed the process of building up my understanding for what drives people to apps, what makes them successful and why companies make the decisions they make in app development.
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There were a few constraints I encountered during the internship such as;
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Time constraints
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Limited resources
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App bugs
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Overall, the internship taught me a lot of what the operations are like for a small company and what being responsible for my own work is like. I felt that working for Ponderly would give me the chance to see how my work could benefit a company and I'm glad to say that it did.
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