Julius
Reimagining Influencer Discovery for Brands & Agencies
Turning influencer chaos into campaign clarity for brands and agencies.
Overview
Julius was one of the most data-rich influencer marketing platforms on the market – and one of the most frustrating to use. Brands and agencies came for the depth of creator intelligence but stayed frustrated by workflows that couldn't keep pace with the speed of modern campaigns. I joined as Lead Product Designer at a pivotal moment: the influencer marketing industry was maturing fast, social platforms were constantly shifting the rules, and competitors were multiplying. My role was to move the product from feature parity to market leadership – and to build the UX team capable of sustaining that ambition.
Problem Space
Understanding the challenge.
Business Challenge and User Pain Points.
Business Challenge
Two years of CRM data told a clear story: deals were being lost and clients were churning not because Julius lacked capability, but because the product couldn't communicate its value at the speed agencies needed to work. Competitors were closing the data gap. The window to differentiate on experience – not just data – was narrowing. Leadership needed a product direction that could attract new enterprise accounts while protecting the client base that had been built over years.
User Pain Points
Agency users were managing dozens of influencer campaigns simultaneously, reporting to clients who expected polished, packaged performance data. The platform made them work for every insight. Finding creators, assembling campaign rosters, tracking live performance, and generating client reports each lived in disconnected parts of the experience. Power users had built workarounds. New users gave up. The product's depth was its selling point and its liability – it held more than anyone could easily reach.
Constraints
Confidential platform data and social API relationships created constraints on what could be surfaced and how. Unpredictable changes from social platforms – altered API access, shifting engagement metrics, new content formats – meant the design system needed to flex constantly. An acquisition integration was running in parallel, requiring the product to absorb a competitor's feature set without losing coherence.
Research
How we listened.
Key Insights
- 1Agency users needed to package campaign performance for clients – the platform had the data but no clear path from raw metrics to presentable narrative
- 2Lost deals clustered around two missing capabilities: influencer collaboration tools and first-party social data access
- 3Churned clients cited workflow fragmentation – too many steps to accomplish tasks competitors handled in fewer clicks
- 4Customer Success spent significant time bridging gaps the product should have closed – a signal that UX debt was being paid in headcount
Strategy
Building on familiar mental models.
Reviewers already know invoices. We designed the digital experience to feel like one, then layered progressive disclosure and transparency on top. Rather than introducing a new paradigm, the interface anchored to something billing teams had used for years, reducing the learning curve and lowering the activation energy required to trust a new automated system.
Familiarity
The mental model of a paper invoice grounded the interface: layout, hierarchy, and terminology borrowed from what users already understood.
Progressive disclosure
Show the validation result first; reveal the source detail on demand. Confidence before complexity.
Transparency
Every automated decision is attributable to a data source, with plain-language explanations of what matched, what didn't, and why.
Process
How we got there.
Audit & CRM Analysis
Started not with wireframes but with data – two years of win/loss records and churn feedback. Eliminated noise from generic competitive benchmarking and focused entirely on what Julius's actual users were asking for and walking away without.
User Testing at Scale
Ran structured testing sessions with 80 users across 25 accounts over five weeks. Rather than controlled lab conditions, sessions were designed to surface real workflow friction – how users actually tried to get their job done, where they got stuck, and what they reached for when the product failed them.
Affinity Mapping & Prioritisation
Grouped all qualitative feedback using affinity mapping and classified responses on a sentiment scale from very positive to very negative. This gave the team a shared, evidence-based view of where to invest first and how to sequence the roadmap for maximum impact.
Influencer Hub: Zero to One
Designed and launched the Influencer Hub – a net-new collaboration space giving brands and agencies direct, structured communication channels with creators inside the platform. This was the feature that converted 18% of previously unreachable prospects and was central to the acquisition integration.
Integration Design: Bitly & Shopify
Designed the Bitly and Shopify integration experiences, closing the loop between influencer campaign activity and measurable business outcomes – link tracking, traffic attribution, and sales conversion. This directly addressed the root cause of 33% of churned business.
Acquisition Integration
Led the UX work to absorb a competitor product's feature set into Julius post-acquisition. This required reconciling two design languages, two user mental models, and two sets of stakeholder expectations – without fracturing the experience for either user base.
Solution
What we built.
The final design system addressed each insight directly – with structural changes to information architecture, updated interaction patterns, and a refined visual language calibrated to the emotional register of the problem.
Influencer Hub
Influencer Hub
Direct collaboration channel – brief sharing, approvals, and campaign coordination between brands and creators in one place.
Creator Discovery
1,247 resultsOlivia Chen
@oliviafit · 280K
James Moore
@jamesactive · 145K
Priya Singh
@priyawellness · 310K
Redesigned Discovery
Unified search across 50+ data points – audience demographics, engagement rate, brand affinity, and AI match scoring.
Campaign Performance
Live2.4M
Total Reach
+18%
5.6%
Engagement
+0.8%
1,247
Conversions
+33%
Campaign Performance Dashboard
Real-time tracking with client-ready reporting – from raw metrics to a packaged performance narrative agencies can present directly.
Integrations
2 activeBitly
Link tracking & click attribution
Connected
14.2K clicks tracked
Shopify
Sales conversion & revenue attribution
Connected
$48K revenue attributed
Bitly & Shopify Integrations
Closed-loop attribution connecting influencer activity to link clicks, site traffic, and Shopify conversions – the feature that recovered 33% of churned clients.
Live Prototype
Explore the platform.
A fully interactive prototype of the redesigned Julius platform – 9 connected screens including Dashboard, Discovery, Campaigns, Analytics, and AI Insights.
Launch Interactive Prototype
9 screens · Fully clickable · No login required
Impact
Business outcomes across the enterprise.
Retained all existing clients through the Influencer Hub launch
Recovered through Bitly and Shopify integration experiences
Converted prospects dependent on influencer collaboration and first-party social data
Previously churned clients returned following product improvements
“I need to report on key performance metrics for my client in a packaged way that shows the value we added to the paid partnership influencer campaigns as an agency.
Reflection
What I learned.
This was the project that taught me what it means to lead design at the product strategy level – not just to design well, but to make the case for where design energy should go and why. The CRM audit was one of the most valuable research activities I've run: two years of business outcomes, mapped back to product gaps. It turned design prioritisation from a debate into a decision. The Influencer Hub launch was also a lesson in the relationship between product and trust. Retaining 100% of existing clients through a major new feature launch isn't a given – it required involving users in the process, communicating transparently about what was changing, and designing the transition as carefully as the destination. The industry context – constant social platform changes, unpredictable API shifts – also shaped how I think about design systems. Resilience isn't just a technical property. A well-designed system should be able to absorb change without falling apart. That's as true of the product as it is of the team building it.