Driving engagement through meaningful conversation

The Challenge: Design a new and improved conversational experience that is unique to Twitter

The Conversation Card format was revered as one of Twitter’s most unique monetization offerings that drove intangible value for brands looking to drive conversation and launch creative activations on the platform however, the format had not seen any active investment for years, resulting in a dated, stale and confusing user experience.

The Solution: An interactive ad experience that unlocked Twitter’s conversational superpower

A redesigned Conversation Card ad format that helps brands build awareness and drive conversations by leveraging CTAs to encourage consumers to participate in meaningful conversation. This format builds on the early success of a newer ad format, Interactive Text and provided a much needed facelift to better serve the format’s original intent. The conversational UI/UX took traditional tweets to the next level while captivating attention and a dynamic emphasis on the conversation.

My Role: Senior Product Designer

Led design exploration, experience definition and strategy while collaborating closely with cross functional partners to bring this redesigned format to life.

Legacy Context

We conducted research with consumers to understand their perceptions of the legacy conversation card ad format. The research clearly highlighted that consumers had trouble understanding how to interact with Conversation Cards, often confusing them for polls as well as little inclination or incentive to engage or tweet. In the event consumers responded to the initial conversation card, the published tweet provided no context or reinforcement of what the tweet was in response to, which caused further confusion.

Problem Statements & Opportunity Territories

Ideation Workshop

Kicking off the project, I worked closely with Product and spearheaded the definition of our Problem and How Might We statements. These served as a guide to anchor the team’s focus during the ideation workshop I led.

Concept Design Explorations

The workshop resulted in dozens of ideas and ultimately six concepts made the cut, before further prioritization.

Prioritized Concept

We considered consumer and business impact as well as product purpose alignment and feasibility in order to narrow our focus to a single concept. We decided to leverage and scale a new ad format that Twitter had been testing and built off of the early success and positive response that had been received. Interactive Text Ads served as the foundation that powered the redesigned conversation card format, giving advertisers the opportunity to unlock Twitter’s conversational power for more creative brand expression and offering consumers a more interactive ad experience.

The new and improved experience provided a powerful new way for advertisers to extend their presence across the platform. The much needed facelift focused on building brand awareness, captivating user attention and driving interaction to better serve the format’s original intent. There was a strong emphasis on elevating the user experience, gearing towards sparking fun yet meaningful conversation along with infusing a delightful tweet to unlock feature that rewards users with exclusive content access.

One of the larger issues we had to solve for was the limitations of the legacy format that only displayed a user’s response to a conversation card and completely omitted the context of what the response was related to. We designed a contextual quote tweet to help reinforce the complete story and provide advertisers the potential for further audience reach and brand awareness.

Future Reward Incentives Concept

Looking beyond an MVP solution, I began focusing on user incentives and how this could scale across Conversation Cards. The concept was put through our rapid research program, where we were able to gather a preliminary responses and high level feedback. Overall consumers felt they would be more inclined to engage if the conversation card was coming from a brand they followed and trusted and if the messaging made it clear that they would receive a reward for participating.

Final Design

The redesigned format was fast tracked and slated to skip the pilot stage and head straight to beta once the ad creation flow was developed and in place for advertisers.