Salesforce Case Study - Seamless Studio
After being brought onto the Advertising Studio product back in December 15’, it was clear that we had a serious problem with integration across the suite of products. The Studio was built up of 2 companies (soon to be 4), Active Audiences, an audience activation application (built within the Marketing Cloud monolith) and Social.com, a social campaigns builder and data/reports manager (a recently purchased startup). This naturally presented a developing problem for both our users, business and team in terms of maintaining a seamless and easily maintainable, profitable experience.
Framing the Problem.
Problem Statement: Each application had two sets of completely different UI, experience and code base. Nor did it have a consistent & integrated experience from one application to the other, you actually had to log in twice to complete key use cases. This was naturally a less than pleasant and not so seamless experience for our end user.
Constraints
We were tasked to come up with a VISION or blue sky experience of a fully integrated Advertising Studio product but something that could be pulled apart and built in small, actionable and measurable pieces.
Who
At this juncture, we hadn’t even developed or established any personas that fit the new product direction. Luckily the Marketing Cloud UX research team had been putting in a ton of work that we could adopt here and after a series of user interviews with myself and my fellow researcher, we settled on a few key Marketing Cloud personas that we believed to fit the new, more integrated strategy.
Success Metrics
What we knew we had to achieve here was a reduction in customer support tickets and begin to ease the burden on account managers, who had become almost a necessary part of a contract to use Ad Studio to its fullest. (Actual metrics have not been included here).
Workshop
For me, starting any project begins with a kick off document and meeting. This is a time to get everyone key to the projects success around the table and get sharing some initial knowledge. I however started this larger and meatier project off with a 3 day workshop.
A few key outputs we gained from the workshop;
A shared understanding of the problem, who it was for and our long term goal/vision.
Building out use cases, current and future into a Google sheet again allowed for a shared repository and prioritisation. This allowed us to focus on a certain couple key areas of the platform.
Crafting sketches together and discussing those built up morale and a collection of wide ranging out of the box ideas. Many of these were put in the parking lot for later use but we had plenty to work on as a result.
A storyboard of our initial vision thinking
Design & Flows
After the workshop, we got down to business with all the fantastic ideas that were produced and continued to work on the UX storyboard and flows. I spent a few days refining the sketches to pull something more solid and cohesive together, whilst collaborating heavily with my fellow UX researcher and PM.
We had two key areas in the journey that we believed needed our attention.
The first was a central area or hub for our users to get started, have an overview of currently active audiences, campaigns, creatives etc. This would be a place to jump in to get a quick temperature gauge. In addition to giving our variety of personas the different paths they needed to get straight to whatever task they needed to complete. Be it build out a new audience, a new social campaign, a set of new creatives to be used in the campaigns etc
The second area was within the campaign builder activity itself. We currently had a confusing, circuitous and heavy way of adding audiences and creatives to a campaign, we aimed to tackle that as well and acted as our more central problem to solve.
Early Concept Design
After journey mapping and garnering an understanding of our vision of an integrated, seamless Advertising Studio, I dove into a bit of concept/prototyping work. This was purely a rapid dive in to produce higher fidelity work for presentational purposes for a variety of stakeholders..
To Conclude.
After spending a couple of weeks on this vision project, we collated our notes, sketches, flows, research etc and presented it back to the wider team for further buy in. Sadly, we didn’t go through to the next stage and conduct rounds of user testing to validate our work, due to a strategical shift in focus from the business. It was to be put on hold. This happens from time to time and with an ever evolving and rapidly changing business such as Salesforce, we learned to conduct more thorough up front discovery work with our stakeholders to ensure we aligned with the future wider strategies.