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Astral grows publishing creators (aka Experts) businesses by transforming their existing content libraries into valuable new products, insights & automations.
I've driven the product design for Astral's AI capabilities through several iterations - from a dedicated feed space, to a website widget, to a powerful dashboard for content remixing.
The value of Astral is being able to convert an existing content library and automate future publications (e.g. podcast episodes, blog posts) into additional engaging content - growing the audience while saving time and money.
Initially, Astral's value came in the form of a dedicated feed. To enable deeper engagement with the content, a 1-to-1 chat experience was created, replicating the tone of voice of the Expert. This allowed Users to access in-depth knowledge at any time, without having to navigate through endless publications.
The responses are not only in the same tone of voice of the Expert, but also include additional value such as contextual upsells & furthers links to source material.
However, this meant that the Expert had to segment their traffic to a separate space. To address this, the focus shifted to integrating Astral directly into the Expert's existing platform.
This embedded solution enables the audience to interact with content that's not necessarily present on the website, i.e. ingested from external feeds and publications.
Based on engagement metrics, various overlay variations were tested and iterated upon to determine the most engaging elements, such as Highlights and bite-sized Summaries, leading into a contextually crafted up-sell funnel or email capture.
Right-center variant clearly won with a higher probability of being opened. This also prevented potential collision with cookie banners on mobile.
To simplify the onboarding process and allow Astral's customers to set it up and start benefiting with lowered effort, numerous user journeys, flows, and prototypes were crafted to land on the most intuitive experience. A key challenge was to avoid overwhelming the User with the initial step of adding existing content to get started.
After onboarding, the focus shifted to understanding why Experts would visit the dashboard in the first place. Through research, it was determined that Insights and Engagement Metrics became the focal point, while the Library section was less prominent after the initial setup.
Eventually, after several iterations to find the most useful market fit through demos and testing, it was discovered that generating Content Remixes was the most crucial user case that got people excited. This led to a pivot, highlighting Astral's ability to transform content, such as turning a podcast into a course or show notes into attractive social media posts.
To support this new focus, repeatable UX and UI patterns were established, ready to have remixing workflows attached to them. I then iterated on finding the easiest way to manage content generations, automations, and library structure.
