.svg){kind=small}
As a Marketing/Media Strategist, I need to understand how my business (and my competition) is performing in order to form advertising and marketing strategies so that I can recommend the appropriate path for our partners.
At this martech company, the Client Analytics team was constantly producing customized reports for their advertising partners. The problem was, they found themselves creating the same reports repeatedly, for free! To stop the bleeding, they had created a dashboard product ("BIT v01") meant to capture the most requested data, but we had no users! Our team identified an opportunity to learn more about our partners and what exactly they needed from us.
For this role I was responsible for all UX tasks, from research to visual design.
Working the Sales team, I set up contextual inquiries with three of our primary advertising partners. I invited all primary team members to attend so our research would be more robust. As soon as the interviews were over, we transferred our notes to stickies and formed an empathy map. With the same data points, the team was able to construct a journey map of these end users using the current dashboard. This exercise was important because we were a gaining a shared understanding of the end users’ highs (and lows) that hadn’t existed before.
What did we find? Well, we had created a lot of experience debt! Specifically, in these areas:
After all the research had been clustered, mapped, and features had been listed, we employed the Kano Model to understand where we were going to meet basic expectations, the performance payoff (customer “like” moments), and excitement generators (customer “love” moments). This model would be a living document for the team to maintain, acting as constant reminder that:
Ideally I would have had more time to have my partners use alternative products and observe the results. In lieu of that, I conducted a 10 point heuristic analysis on five of the closest competitors (with our dashboard as a baseline). As a result, I was able to align the team on my findings and high level design recommendations.
Here is an example template of the analysis, filled out for business dashboard maker Domo.
As we entered the design phase, I found myself the facilitator for most of the ideation sessions. It was critical to involve as many disciplines as possible in these sessions, especially members of the development teams. At the time, there was no design system in place, so close communication with these colleagues was necessary to insure we were headed down a technically feasible path.
I used improv comedy games as warm-ups and laid down the goals, rules, and next steps to help my colleagues unlock their creativity. Being remote, it was difficult to get equal participation and keep the creative fire burning. To remedy this, I made sandbox templates in Freehand (or Mural) so there was little for participants to do other than start creating!
After collecting the concepts and dot voting on them with the team, my next objective was to create lo-mid fi clickable prototypes and test them with all the partners we originally interviewed. The team evaluated the concepts by simplicity, efficacy, and usability.
The team aligned on functionality and then I quickly built them in Figma.
Our clients really liked the “Segment Shift” concept: stacked bars that would show migration patterns while hovering.
One of my favorite parts of this story was the working directly with the clients/end users and building the product with them. It was a level of collaboration I had not experienced before. Through that collaboration it was clear that we were taking the product to another level!
Unfortunately, as the final stage was approaching, I was part of a layoff due to the pandemic! That being said, I'm showing this work because we were able to take an existing product with no users and turn it into a useful tool that actually provided delight! I was proud of the work my team was able to deliver and I hope the momentum we started is able to continue.
This was the next iteration that I was going to test with our partners (not the final design).
Next Case Study: Validation ToolBack to Case Studies