Context
Influencer marketing ran on trust. Ifluencer needed to run on results.
At the time, most influencer marketing worked on flat fees: a brand pays a creator a lump sum to post, with little reliable way to connect that spend to what it actually produced — clicks, conversions, sales. Some influencers charged significant fees regardless of outcome, and brands had no transparent view into performance.
The founder's goal was a platform where compensation is tied to real, trackable outcomes — affiliates and influencers earn commission on performance, not just reach.
My design goal was to give that audience a professional home base for their half of the relationship: discover relevant campaigns, apply and negotiate, receive materials once accepted, run their own promotions, and see transparent, real-time data on results.
Problems
Difficulty tracking real sales
No transparency about affiliates and influencers effortes and resultes - commissions for real resultes
User Research & Insights
This was a pre-launch build with no existing user base and no dedicated research budget, so research ran primarily through structured, recurring conversations with the founder/PM, who brought early conversations with prospective brands and affiliates. I supplemented that with:
Competitive audits of existing affiliate and influencer platforms, to understand patterns creators already expect — and where those tools stayed opaque about performance.
Informal validation — walking early discovery and application flows past a small number of contacts who matched the affiliate/influencer profile, to sanity-check the structure before it went to development.
Affiliates need to scan and filter opportunities fast — by industry, commission rate, and required channel — but comparable tools bury this behind generic, low-density lists.
Managing several simultaneous brand relationships across applications, messages, and materials, with no single view of status, is a real source of friction.
Commission and payout tracking is often opaque or lives in a separate tool from the campaign itself — reporting needed to sit next to the work, not apart from it.
Key design decisions
Every major decision was driven by a specific research finding — not a visual preference. The before/after framing shows the problem each decision solved.
Key is transparency of relationship
Decision
Influencers will direct people to their landing pages - they can list products/brands they believe.
Sidebar status hierarchy replaces a flat machine list
Decision
Allow affiliates access to manage their relationship, get materials, track commissions.
Task creation consolidates three separate workflows
Decision
Ability to run flash sales on our platform - upload items, inventory, track the conversions.
Key screens
Results and Reflection
Impact:
No launch metrics — a complete system and direct stakeholder trust instead.
Outcomes
Key is transparency of relationship
compensation is tied to real, trackable outcomes — affiliates and influencers earn commission on performance, not just reach.
What I learned:
Designing without a live user base
Ifluencer was pre-launch — no existing users, no research budget, and I was the only designer, working with one PM/founder as my primary source of user insight.
Ground design decisions in something more than my own assumptions, with the access I actually had.
Every major IA decision — filtering structure, application pipeline, materials access — traced back to a real (if informal) signal, not just intuition.
Turning ambiguity into structure
As solo designer on Ifluencer, I was handed a broad brief from the founder/PM — build a platform connecting brands, influencers, and affiliates around commission-based performance — with no existing IA, no research team, and significant redundancy across the three user types (brand, affiliate/influencer, admin all needed overlapping campaign, messaging, and reporting functionality).
I needed to turn that high-level, somewhat tangled brief into a coherent, buildable product structure — without a research team or existing system to lean on.