Minds Networks in action

Networks checkout experience

First iteration of checkout designs

User flow - free trial

user flow - upgrade

The Networks checkout experience was built on top of Stripe, beginning with selecting a network plan based on a user's specific needs. Michael Wroblewski, our design lead and my co-designer on the initiative, took the lead on this flow, whilst I iterated on visuals and served as a thought partner. We later streamlined this flow to combine with our marketing website.

Read more about this initiative here.

Within the legacy checkout flow, users are able to choose add-ons based on their needs, such as a companion mobile app (our top add-on), technical support and moderation support for their community. Users can enter their payment details, or proceed with common options such as Apple Pay, with a confirmation screen.

Selecting a Networks plan to purchase

Checkout screen

We simplified the purchase experience after feedback from prospective customers and clients, unifying purchase with our marketing and pricing pages with Stripe. To promote add-ons, we placed purchase links in-product, and marketed to already converted customers.

Network settings dashboard - mission control for your social needs

Network owners are encouraged to set their network up, including connecting their domain to personalize the network before launch. Initial recommended steps before launching a network include customizing brand assets, setting community guidelines, and user permissions. Once set up, users can seamlessly be invited to the network via email or link to sign up.

Admin dashboard onboarding screen

Whilst working on the marketing efforts and in collaboration with our star engineers Mark and Ben, there was a potential experiment to make the onboarding experience smooth, such as configuring a domain correctly via your domain name and an AI agent working in the background, while creating bot accounts to be used for community announcements and more. This also helped us get closer to the goal of giving users control back of their time, so that they can focus on growing their audience, revenue and even advertising.

Check it out live here.

Marketing experiment to take the guesswork out of onboarding

Designing for privacy

We had to ensure that we were designing with user privacy, transparency and autonomy in mind. To that end, we enable every user and network owner to download, delete and opt out of tracking and analytics (via PostHog events).

Data opt-out

Whilst being focused on designing for trust and transparency, if I were revisiting the project I would have liked to test our implementation against a data opt-in flow that would be part of a user's onboarding or day one experience upon signing up. I hypothesize that being up-front and transparent with users during the onboarding would encourage users to opt-in instead.

Early testing of our MVP prototype had brought forward the question of private networks, where prospective network owners only wanted signed up members to be able to view and interact with content. This was an important usage case for closed communities such as Jimmy Dore, where viewing privileges and credentials were configured via single sign on.

To that end, we added a public visibility setting, and a low touch landing page for users who still might want to advertise groups and memberships. When both settings are turned off, a visitor is presented with a 404 page.

Toggle setting to control visibility

Landing page shown to logged out users

Easily customize a network with a custom domain and your brand

The appearance tab in the network dashboard provides a way for owners to completely customize their network's look and feel. Network owners can set their brand's specific color, upload logo assets for their network, and choose between light and dark themes to present to users.

This implementation was cohesive in that each network was able to maintain a unique brand identity while offering just the right amount of control. Future roadmap plans that I was able to flesh out with our CEO, CTO and PM include a potential system for users to upload custom fonts, and personalize their network even further.

This feature, while highly requested fell into roadblocks initially due to potential licensing and font usage issues. A solution that we had considered earlier but deprioritized, and could be feasible is pre-loading a selected grouping of open source fonts via CDN or Google fonts. This would allow users a constrained, yet diverse choice over the typography of their network.

For a network owner's domain setup, I approached the design of this surface taking inspiration from industry leaders such as Vercel, GoDaddy and Namecheap. A common design pattern for domain management is an always up to date status, which informs the user to take action.

Domain tab - top level

Domain tab - educational component

Communicating the various states when a user inputs a new domain in real-time.

To that end, I designed the domain settings surface around the status of their network's domain, with a user being able to set a custom subdomain, and have the status reflected on their network, adding greater personalization. After a round of informal testing with our second client, Tablet, we iterated on a way to provide in-app education about setting up a domain that is informative, yet brief. To that end, we linked out to a separate setup guide that links to a blog article going into domain management in more detail, while providing a brief overview.

A potential solution to not have the in-app education component be so information dense would be to use progressive disclosure within the component to present more information, while still reducing density on the page.

Advanced curation and moderation features

User roles and permissioning

I led design on Networks' permissions surface, with a focus on flexibility for network administrators. The initial roles for all networks are set to owner, administrator, moderator, verified and default.

However, initial testing exposed that certain power users would prefer the flexibility of custom roles, as well as editing existing roles. Whilst this feature was out of scope for our initial launch, it is on the roadmap, and I was able to explore some initial directions for how we may offer users flexibility and customizability.

The permissions surface has been designed in a way that is extensible to include custom roles if a network owner chooses. Whilst we did not expose this functionality in v1 of launch, it is on the current roadmap. I also designed the permission handling to optimize for flexibility, with network owners being able to paywall certain functionality based on their needs.

Permissions grouped by action type

One of our development constraints was only being able to expose certain controls during the initial launch, and adding granular permissions iteratively. To that end, we designed the permission surface to scale with all possible permissions to expose, aiming to reduce cognitive load for a network administrator or owner.

Network admins can search and assign users to roles. If I were revisiting the project, I would have loved to iterate on a potential flow to batch edit multiple users. We had already built out the functionality on the backend with our invite system, and repurposing this would serve common use cases for community managers. A common use case for one of our clients, Jimmy Dore, was to have certain members who joined by a certain date posting and moderation privileges.

Featured users and groups - never miss an update

One of the most common pain points that we discovered during initial user interviews, as well as our prior experience with the Minds social network, was that community owners were unable to curate the community's initial experience and feed when a user first signs up. This led to lost opportunities for media companies and publishers to engage with potential fans.

A new user was also more likely to stay on the community if they connected and engaged with like minded members, and interacted with relevant content.

To that end, we created a simple, yet effective way to curate a new user's initial feed so that their feed was not completely empty upon joining. This also saved legwork on the network owner's end, as users could always unsubscribe if needed.

A network owner can set any account up, or a group for community announcements and set notification alerts. A common use case for this feature for media companies like Tablet has been to set up an account, use our RSS sync integration to automatically post articles when published, and notify community members. Represented as a post on the network, this enables community members to discuss the article and increase traffic to their site.

Content moderation

Our goal with the reporting and content moderation system was to encourage community owners to manage and moderate content efficiently. However, if I were revisiting the project, I would definitely want to advocate for allowing customers to plug in to existing moderation tools such as iffy by Gumroad, helping reduce moderation costs for larger customers and still be compliant with their network's guidelines.

To that end, when a user reports a post or an account, they have to confirm a reason for submitting content to report. A generalized community guidelines choice is given to adapt to variable guidelines that exist for different communities.

Surface - Post reporting and moderation

Surface - Account reporting and moderation

Once a report is submitted, the network owner or moderator gets notified, and pending reports are presented in chronological order by recency. Moderators have an option to delete reported content, ignore the report, or even take action and ban a user from the network. We designed the feed to ensure that moderators can quickly discern why content is being reported, with the post preview allowing moderators to make an informed decision.

Network personalization

Navigation settings

A common use case for our early clients was directing traffic to their homepages and site, with the network being a critical entry point. Prospective network owners also wanted to be able to personalize their network's navigation and pages. An insightful example in action was our client Fishtank, who's chronological trending feed was more engaged with, and thus wanted this trending feed to be the first entry point into the community for new members.

To achieve this, we designed a system that allowed network owners to set any homepage, such as memberships or even a group that is highly engaged. Network owners can also create custom links, with a constrained selection of icons and link to their publishing website.

Always keep connected with chat

We were grateful to have an initial version of live chat that our design lead, Michael, and myself had shipped over the last quarter, in the networks app itself. While we intentionally designed chat to be minimal and constrained, it scales with the ability for simple group dm's, media uploads and rich embeds, perfect for smaller communities

Networks chat

Read more about the design of chat here, courtesy of our awesome design lead Michael!

Bulk invites made easy

A critical need for clients such as Tablet and Jimmy Dore, as well as any publishers with large audiences and email lists, was the ability to quickly import their audiences into a network. While initial invitations worked fairly simply, with users using a universal link that could be shared, they didn't allow the control of what the user's role and posting permissions would be, or what groups they would want a user to join. An example was Tablet magazine, who used separate email lists for their tiers of readerships and community members, and some of these members were disparate. While the invite link could get them signed up to the network, network owners and admins would still have to do the legwork of assigning user roles manually. There had to be a better way to help save legwork for our clients, while helping new members sign up and retain on the community.

I worked closely with Ben, our engineer to design and help implement bulk invites. Owners can add email addresses that are csv formatted, bulk assign roles with posting permissions and badges, as well as assign group memberships. We also hypothesized that with e-mail being This helped ensure that new members were welcomed with activity and content, rather than a stale feed of announcements. However, if users simply want to use a unique link for a membership and are short on time, they can use the link invite tab to quickly copy a link and share it out on other channels.

Invite (email with link)

Invite (email with link)

Invite to network with link

Invite to network membership with link

Network owners can easily track invite status, as well as revoke invitation links if there is a potential error.

Pending email invites

Monetize your audience with memberships and ads

Having a community with members, an audience and lively discussion is great, but how might network owners monetize them? A wide variety of our clients offered exclusive content and access to groups for paid members, and needed a way to gate this exclusive content on the network as well. Enter the memberships feature of Minds Networks, with the flexibility of running via your existing provider, or through Stripe if you're just starting out.

Our key goal with the memberships feature especially, was flexibility. We discovered that while a lot of clients were just starting out, our larger clients already had paying members on existing platforms such as Patreon or internal SSO systems. To that end, our engineering team worked closely with clients to automatically sync memberships via querying the membership link and creating an API. Designing with this engineering consideration in mind, a membership defaults to using Stripe if no link is provided. If a link is provided, we use that link to query the membership via the API and Zapier integration with periodic updates.

Network owners and influencers can also post exclusive content and grant access to exclusive groups paywalled by memberships, helping ensure a more intimate community experience for your biggest fans.

Boost - a way to monetize your social network with advertisements

With Minds Networks, independent creators, publishers and media companies can leverage their large audiences with advertising partners, and serve social ads. On websites such as Tablet and Fishtank, which get thousands of new impressions a day, Boost fulfilled an important use case for customers, as it unlocks a possible new revenue stream for them.

This is enhanced even more by the embedded Boost unit, which is an embedded, dynamic social ad that can be placed anywhere on a website with a javascript snippet. One of our early clients, Fishtank, was able to leverage Boost early this way, earning $5000 in ad spend within just 2 weeks of their launch.

Example of a boost unit

We designed the flow in a way to be flexible for network owners. This also includes a way for users to access making a boost with a single, shareable link, lowering the barrier to entry for smaller advertisers.

Boost and post from an invite link

Currently Boost is only offered via Stripe, but in future roadmaps, we plan to accept crypto payments via MetaMask. This comes with a caveat, however as it would need to be compliant with the regulatory landscape.

Easy integration with existing media infrastructure and blogs

With our ideal customer profile, as well as initial clients being focused in the media and publishing space, with external websites that hosted most of their content, it was critical for us to be able to connect discussion about their content both on their site, as well as the network. In fact, market research by Gartner shows that content focused communities are a useful lever in improving audience retention, as well as expansion.

On the network owner's end, all they have to do is copy paste a code snippet and specify the wildcard or domain where the plugin will be applied. Now, that article on a user's website also has a corresponding post created on the network, with the article embedded. Comments on the website reflect on the network, and vice versa, ensuring that members are never in FOMO mode.

With network owners being able to set up RSS sync with accounts to auto-post content and announcements, this worked in synergy with embedded comments on articles, reducing busywork for network owners and admins who would otherwise manually update and post, on a set schedule. A typical workflow for some of our media clients was setting up various community and announcement related accounts, syncing up their RSS feed to the channel to set up auto-posting, and have community members interact with articles on the network itself.

If network members have not visited the network in a while, the network sends an automated email with some of the top posts and notifications from the network, serving as a retention lever for users.

Email digest

Mobile app add on

Generate app preview

Release on the app store

Network owners can take their social experience mobile, and make sure that their community is up to date on mobile. Networks' mobile app add on feature consisted of a low-risk app preview, which we hypothesized would be a low friction point for users wanting to try the feature out, but not ready to commit to the add on fees.

Mobile app assets

Mobile splash page

We were able to facilitate this flow with a previewer app that a user installs and opens, scanning the QR code generated a user's network admin panel. Users input a custom app icon, a splash image and logos to help customize the look and feel of their mobile experience.

From a functional perspective, the image presentation and login screen options are a group of radio buttons. However, during our initial rounds of user testing, clients and network admins were unsure about the differences between contain and cover. On the other hand, clients felt more comfortable when given a visual representation of how their image would look like on an app screen. Armed with this insight, I aimed to contextualize these options by having a skeleton that visually shows the result of their choice. This would enable users to make their choice with clarity, and not face as much of the friction which would occur with generating multiple previews.

Live app preview status

Once satisfied, users click on the build app preview CTA to generate a QR code. The status card is dynamic, and once a preview has been generated, the user scans the QR code to view on the previewer app.

App tracking policy and non-profit disclosure

In our designs, it was critical to consider app tracking policy, as well as in-app payments for creators wanting to offer memberships. Whilst we were constrained in implementing in-app payments, a number of our clients were approved non-profits, where the iOS and Play stores allow direct linking to membership products. We leveraged this to include a simple opt-in for organizations and users who are approved non-profits, enabling mobile donations and payments for memberships.