Product Design
Mesh Communities
Mesh Analytics Dashboard
A creator analytics dashboard that explains how posts, followers, and earnings add up, so the numbers stop feeling like a black box.
My role
UX researcher and lead designer
Company
Mesh Communities
Timeline
2024
Outcome
V1 specified
[ Project hero image ]
Overview
Making the numbers behind creator earnings legible
Transparency as the product
Mesh is built around communities, so the people who run them should be able to see what their work is worth. I set the guidelines for transparency and defined the KPIs that show creators whether they’re succeeding on Mesh. I worked as UX researcher and lead designer, from the first competitor audit through the V1 spec.
The problem
On the big platforms, community builders do much of the work that makes money, and they often see only a sliver of it. Campaign earnings are opaque. Reach can drop with no explanation. Analytics tools hand over a number without saying much about what to do about it. Creators are left unsure what they should be earning, or whether they’re being paid fairly for what they’ve built.
Earnings without context
Creators can’t see what a campaign earned overall, so they can’t tell whether their share is fair.
Metrics that stop at the numbers
Most analytics suites report the same handful of indicators, then leave you to guess what to do next.
Knowledge held by other creators
The gap gets filled by creators posting their own workarounds. It’s useful but scattered, and nothing in the product points you to it.
Community work treated as a thankless duty
Community leaders carry moderation and care work with few tools for the first and no way to earn from the second.
Context
Reading the field before drawing a screen
Before sketching anything, I audited the analytics that Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok give their creators. I wanted to know what’s standard, what’s useful, and what’s missing. A competitor matrix and a SWOT analysis held it all in one place.
Artifact
The competitor matrix and SWOT analysis behind the V1 scope.
Facebook offers a familiar, industry-standard layout and gamifies milestones with levels and rewards. Instagram separates insights, tools, and tips cleanly, shows content previews, and surfaces the most relevant tips first. TikTok puts the most important metrics up front, adds inspiration posts, viewer rankings, and follow suggestions, and splits content and follower data into tabs. What none of them did well was connect the numbers to earning more, and none were built for communities. That gap became my starting point.
“
Creators build the value and can’t see how it’s counted.
Process
I moved from comparison to people, then to flow. Then I cut the feature set down with stakeholders so the first release answered one question well: how is my audience doing?
01
Competitive analysis. I compared Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in a matrix and a SWOT to see what’s standard and what’s missing.
02
Personas and user stories. I built two personas: Jason, a plant-shop owner in Atlanta, and Max, a fitness influencer in Brooklyn. Jason wanted to know which advertising was working, and Max wanted to understand and engage his followers. I turned their goals and pain points into user stories with acceptance criteria.
03
User flow and wireframes. I mapped the path from profile, to dashboard, to a node’s insight details, then wireframed it screen by screen.
04
Scoping V1. Working with stakeholders, I trimmed the suite to the essentials so the first release would give people a clear look at their audience.
Solution
People reach analytics from the profile drawer. The page shows insights for their profile or for any node they run, in a single scroll of the information that matters most for understanding performance.
Decisions worth naming
Metrics are defined plainly. Followers is follows minus unfollows for each day. Post impressions is the total impressions for each day.
Selected points explain themselves. Tapping a data point highlights it in the “on topic” color and opens a callout, such as “22 followers gained on Apr 23 compared to the day before.”
Two time ranges. Month to date, or the last 30 days.
Impressions show where they came from. They split members from non-members and show the source location.
Reach and engagement are split between members or followers and everyone else.
Earnings sit alongside the rest. A daily graph shows the total, with the percent change against the previous period.
Help is built in. “My tools” links to the wiki, tutorials, and creator hub, and “Tools to set up” flags steps like monetization and verification.
Final design
The V1 screens, from the profile drawer to followers, reach, engagement, and earnings (sample data).
Outcome
The dashboard is designed and specified for V1. The next step is measuring whether creators can use it to understand and grow their earnings.
The shift
From guessing to reading.
The shift I designed for is a creator going from wondering what their numbers mean to being able to act on them.
Reflection
What I learned
Looking back
What I’ll carry forward from this project is how much of the work was deciding what to leave out. The research made it easy to want everything: levels and rewards from Facebook, tips and previews from Instagram, rankings and follow suggestions from TikTok. But a creator opening analytics for the first time needs one answer before they need ten, which is how their audience is doing. So V1 became followers, impressions, reach, engagement, and earnings, and the rest waited.
The premise underneath it mattered most to me. Transparency only counts if the person reading the numbers can act on them. That’s why defining each metric, and deciding what a selected data point should say, mattered as much as the layout.
What I can’t claim yet is that it works. This is a design and a spec, not a measured result. The next step is putting it in front of creators like Jason and Max and seeing whether they can use it to make a real decision about their earnings. I’d also look at what we cut and ask which of those questions people still can’t answer.
Alyssa Jones © 2026