Complex Media
Trying to Understand the User
The Brief
The Subject
Complex is a huge trend-reporting platform and street-wear brand. In the past, they have also had a physical magazine with a loyal following; currently they only publish on their website and various social media platforms. They also host an annual convention (ComplexCon) and various artist popups in LA, and have merch drops in collaboration with various artists. We worked with them after their acquisition by NTWRK.
The Problem
Complex wanted to move in a new strategic direction to build out and emphasize its “Shop” feature. To that end, they wanted to understand what types of users the website and socials were currently drawing, what their shopping habits looked like, and how other players in the market were navigating the e-commerce space. This was an essential exercise as part of the larger project of strategy building for 2025.
Summary of Process
Researching Complex’s Social Media Presence
Collaborating with Design
Usability Study for the Shop Website
The Big User Study (TM)
Organizing the Data
What’s Next
Learnings and Takeaways
Researching Complex’s Social Media Presence 🧐
My first port of call was to understand how Complex presented to its audience. What did they post, how frequently, what did average posts look like, and how did they stack up against their self-identified competition?
This was an in-depth report done across large social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and then across all other platforms where Complex maintained some form of presence such as Facebook, Snapchat, and X. The analysis leaned more towards looking at how Complex and its competitors funnelled users from the social media platform to any potential shopping avenues.
Collaborating with Design 👩🏻🎨
One of the key features I wanted to emphasize to convert users to shoppers was the use of platform-specific Shop features (Instagram Shop, TikTok Shop), which were being adopted by a number of players in the field and were also favoured by algorithms.
I worked with design to draft mock-ups of how these integrations would look like on social media, as well as how they would play out for the user. These visualisations helped showcase the efficiency of going from seeing to buying for a user.
Usability Study for the Shop Website 📚
During the course of the larger strategy work, I also worked on a usability study for the Shop website re-design. The goal was to test basic discoverability of articles and features, and understand how users navigated the website. We collaborated with the design team to build a working prototype and testing was done via Maze, which gave us in-depth data on task completion times and heat-maps to aid our analysis.
The Big User Study (TM) ✨
One of our main activities when it came to strategy work was the persona excercise. When working with a client like Complex with a huge, existing user-base, it was a very exciting prospect to plan how we could go about gathering the data we needed to build user personas.
My approach involved two steps of information gathering. I started with a mass survey, that would get me a lot of data to start developing some base statistics to build upon. I would add to this with interviews with select volunteers from those who filled the survey out (the $100 gift card helped create a pretty large volunteer base to work with).
We decided to leverage Complex’s large email subscriber list to send the survey out. This would mean that the sample pool would consist of people who were already more engaged with the Complex brand, relative to someone who had come across it once or twice.
Since I was spearheading this study, I worked closely with multiple departments including Product, Design, and Marketing, to refine our questions and copy edit our language so that it was in line with the Complex brand whilst still getting the exact information we needed.
The final survey aimed to understand users as people, as digital natives, as followers of Complex, and then finally as shoppers.
Organizing the Data 📈
The survey received a significant response. As a researcher, there’s nothing more exciting than being given a big bank of data to work with, and tackling the challenge of figuring out how to organize it all into a comprehensive, digestable format and translate it into information that is actionable.
I organized the data by age and then within that by employment type; this would help us group people by their propensity to shop as well as their ability to do so and these were the groups between which I saw significant trend shifts in online habits and in relation to Complex.
This was then used to create skeleton personas based solely on the data we collected through the surveys, like the one pictured on the right.
What’s Next 💭
Once we had our statistics, the next step of the project was to conduct interviews and flesh these personas out. We had a bank of users who had volunteered to be interviewed, and for each category we selected 5 users to speak to, to flesh out our personas.
While I was able to chart the way in terms of planning, this was a long-term project and I had to transition off for personal reasons at this point in time. Interviews were carried out based on the moderator guide I had created while I was there and later these personas were iterated on based on feedback from leadership.
