Context

The idea of creating a social media planning tool came a few months before I actually started to actively work on it.

There are a lot – and I mean a lot – of tools out there, but I feel like most of them are way over-engineered and too complex for our day-to-day work.

That’s why, up to this point, we have worked with a simple Google Sheet which basically looked like a calendar and which was being edited by both us internally and the client externally.

Challenges

I never thought I would actually be able to develop a tool like this one until I broke each part down to a single challenge.

The original sketches are unfortunately lost, so the later created wireframes have to do.

Information Architecture

The tool has since evolved quite a bit (from the MVP it was previously) and as of putting together this case, the nav looks like this:

It now includes two new sections which make it easy to distribute budgets and monitor KPIs by using the Facebook Graph API.

Structurally, everything revolves around the posts and their metadata. Here’s a simplified graphic:

Design

The design of the tool is as unobtrusive as can be: The system font is being used (on macOS that is San Francisco), the colors are black and white as well as shades in between, only an interaction color has been added.

All of this makes the content stand out the more – and that’s exactly the idea, to move the focus on the posts.

Even the nav blurs the content below it, amplifying the showcase of the posts.

Outcomes

Conclusions

The project evolved from a very simple idea and an absolute MVP to a project used by half the agency and a few of our clients. Although now larger and more complex than at the beginning, it still is easy to use.

If you want me to show the tool to you, let me know.