Phoenix Marketing International
My Role: Lead UX architect | UX research | UX/UI design
Problem
This was a zero-to-one project that started with research. The goal was to create a dashboard that streamlined user workflows and empowered them with real-time analytics to drive their marketing decisions.
Goal
This was a zero-to-one project that started with research. The goal was to create a dashboard that streamlined user workflows and empowered them with real-time analytics to drive their marketing decisions.
Merging Multiple Products
Phoenix Marketing International (PMI) specializes in capturing advertising performance data. Over the years they had developed proprietary tools that captured and reported specific data to their clients. The need was identified to merge their existing product offerings into one digital dashboard with varying subscription options.
The biggest challenge with this project was planning how to merge three individual products into one cohesive dashboard, not just from a design perspective, but also technically. There were three product teams, three engineering teams and three leadership teams that had to all agree on a plan to move forward. This required a lengthy internal discovery phase with each product team, executive leadership and engineering.
legacy product screens
Phase 1: Research
The project began with a deep dive into understanding PMI’s users, their pain points and desires. We started with a true intent study to try and fully understand how users were using each product and which features they identified as most useful. Additionally, we performed a moderated panel study to observe user behaviors and interactions with the products.
Phase 1 research drove the complex requirements matrix that mapped out the product rollout over a one year period. One of the most unique aspects of this project was the need to perform both internal and user research. In addition to the in-depth user research performed, it was required to establish an internal audit of each product to rank its technical viability. Through the series of internal and technical audits, I was able to work with the product manager and lead engineer to align the user’s desires with business needs and technical feasibility.
Understanding the user journey
Since the user base for the product was new, it was vital after our research phase to organize our data and map out the user journey. Four distinct personas were identified each with specific needs and goals from the product in order to perform their daily job tasks. The product manager and I used these journeys to help map out the requirements matrix to ensure we were integrating the most important features for each user that would align with overall business KPIs.
Mapping the Experience
Once we completed the user research, I worked closely with product management and engineering to begin mapping out the dashboard. This required weekly presentations to stakeholders, daily scrum meetings and internal design collaboration.
Throughout the wireframing process we continued our research efforts with treejack studies and A/B testing with our users.
Iteration 1
The initial iteration followed the wireframe layout closely, but after initial testing we found the colors were not received well and the overall UI felt dated to users. After presenting the testing results with executive leadership, it was agreed to update the brand to reflect their new product offerings and embrace the new horizons for the business.
Quickview+ Dashboard
The result of our intense research and wireframing phases was a dashboard that streamlined the user’s ability to collect, compare and present market research analytics. We integrated micro-interactions to fully utilize their ability to dig deep into the analytics and the ability to create individual campaign buckets. The buckets enabled users to quickly access comparative analytics on a set of ads.
Access to ads were right at their fingertips at any point during their session through the rotating carousel along with robust filtering tools to pinpoint demographics. Complex data strcutures are presented through interactive charts and widgets that present the information to the user in a welcoming and approachable manner. Word clouds, pie charts and verbatim feeds were direct tools identified through user research to include in the dashboard.
Establishing the Design System
Part of the project was to establish a design system library to preserve the styles and compenents that were carefully selected during the design process. PMI had just rebranded their corporate identity and wanted to ensure all future enhancements and dashboards would maintain the brand standard. The full design system was created using Sketch DSM and includes sections for: Foundations, Colors, Text Styles, Icons, Compenents, Imagery and Fonts.
