Enterprise UX

August 1, 2020

Interactive Marketing portal – Case Study

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Interactive Marketing portal – Case Study

“To comply with a non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Security Finance.”

The content marketing web platform is a marketing campaign tool custom developed for Security Finance. The marketing team did not have a unified platform to create and manage adverts. The team used several ways of managing marketing campaigns. With thousands of adverts going out to customers, a consolidated form of managing adverts was long overdue. The team set out to create a platform that solved all the problems of the marketing team.

Task

Aiding the marketing team have a more collaborative and organize workspace for marketing ads.

Strategy

Design Thinking
Design

Product design
Client

Security Finance
Tools

Moleskin Flow, Figma, Ant Design
Team

Business analyst, product designer, product manager, developers
Tags

Product design, UX Strategy

The solution

We ran several weeks of design sprints and user testing based on the design thinking methodology, which includes five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. We eventually created and shipped a fully functional web application that helped the marketing team create and manage marketing campaigns in 2 easy steps.

My role

I led a team of user experience designers to begin primary user research and define key personas, empathy maps, and journey maps. We got new insights from usability tests before we released the product to the entire marketing team. I worked on the final high-fidelity prototype, and the development team helped create the final product.

Research findings

1. Poor advert duration tracking

The marketing team had issues knowing what adverts were effective on different branches. Members of the team would copy each other on emails to the IT Team so they are aware of adverts. They also had to keep track of the advert effective dates in calendars or other ways.

3. Poor user audit

user audits were poorly managed as it was difficult to know who sent what ad to the IT team. Emails had to be grouped to keep track of add creation. If a team member forgot to copy another marketing team member then that member was oblivious to the ad creation.

2. Poor audience tracking

Emails had to be sent to know what ads were running in specific states or branches. Complex and often multiple emails between IT and marketing were needed to know if adverts were active.

4. Poor ad metrics tracking

The IT team had to create reports routinely or requested by the marketing team. Most times the IT team gave the marketing team SQL stored procedures to see the requested metrics of adverts. This was a learning curve for team members without technical expertise.

design sprint meeting whiteboard — Design sprint meeting

Product features

We created a centralized advert location. The vision of the developed platform was to promote transparency and collaboration among the marketing team. The creation of the portal allowed the team to scale their efforts and focus more on planning creative ad campaigns for specific audience. The plan is to add more features to the platform as adoption increases.

Unified advert list

A place to easily keep track of adverts in their different states – inactive, active, expired, published, draft. The list also made it easy to know the audience of each advert.

Previewing system

In order to give the users the ease of previewing a created advert quickly we added the feature to preview an ad quickly and with minimal clicks. Users can preview an advert right from the list, the creation page, and a special audience simulation page.

Targeted Audience – locations and branches

The platforms gave users the ability to target specific audiences across locations and branches in real-time.

User audits

Users are able to see who did what on the platform, thus encouraging team transparency.

Ad reports

Ad performance metrics are shown in real-time

API simulator

The team wanted a way to preview adverts for any location or branch they wanted. So we designed an API simulator that made it easy to query the ad showing in a location and see the details of the ad.

Sample Design guideline artifact to developers

User Testing

It was great to see the smiles on the faces of the marketing team when we unveiled the product to them. Because they were involved in the process, they felt like they were looking at their creation. The CIO of Security finance was pleased about this because our design sprints were not in vain. The goal was to keep it simple, and I believe we achieved that. Remote User testing went great; as tricky as the pandemic made things, it was still a rewarding exercise.

Across the marketing team, we had over 90% user satisfaction from a testing survey conducted. The product simplified how the marketing team created and managed campaigns and led to a 60% reduction in the time it takes to train staff to start a marketing campaign.

Lessons learned

Hindsight is 20-20 they say. I spent a good amount of time talking with C-level executives about the business goal and their perceived notion of the challenges of the marketing team. From speaking with the Marketing team I learned the actual issues they were facing. User research is a must.