Helping A Leader Stay In It's Place
Analytic Partners, a leader in the marketing measurement and optimization space, delivers results-oriented strategic consulting services, marketing analytics and software tools to support their client’s business planning and strategy needs. By providing customized analytics that improve sales performance and marketing ROI, companies gain more impact from their marketing and sales programs improving their customer experiences.
The Problem:
Analytic Partners is relatively conservative, focused on incremental improvements to its existing capabilities over the past 20 years. These incremental improvements did not include an overall look at usability and architecture of the product creating an obstacle to scalabity. The current state of the product made it useful but hardly usable for outside clients and with more nimble upstarts nipping at their heels, danger arose as to the lost of Preferred Provider status from major industry analysts. Not to mention we had 30 days to come up with a brand new prototype and the end of the quarter for a complete design system for this redesigned product.
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Our Role
As Principal Lead Product Designer, we handled User Research/Interviews, Persona Creation, Facilitation of User Journey Sessions and other alignment workshops, Information Architecture, User Flows, Wireframes, Design, Prototyping and User Testing
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Discovery
After preliminary assessments of the project, we found there was no current clear direction as to design of the product. Engineers had put together a functional tool that was usable but missed the mark on industry standard UX/UI best practices. We quickly initiated stakeholder and user interviews to confirm pain points, user needs and business needs.
These were some of the key insights from this exercise:
- No process to fully flesh out how to add features into the product
- No standard UX artifacts to reference
- No uniform layouts for screens causing numerous issues with cognitive load
- User flows that differed but completed similar tasks which showed issues with architecture that needed to be addressed
- Non-compliance with WCAG guidelines (accessibility concerns) which was necessary for a proposed client-partnership.
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The Answer
After going through the process of analyzing business and user needs, we found alignment on the items below:
- Re-Design GPS Enterprise Suite products in order to provide a consistent/cohesive look and feel for AP's line of analytical tools.
- Distill Analytic Partners tools into three main categories
- Increase visual engagement on landing pages
- New typography and iconography to complement a new sleek, contemporary look that makes the product more intuitive.
- Visual balance was paramount, due to high information density of the AP's ROI Genome platform. This would increase efficiency as users spend time ingesting and digesting this information to make strategic marketing decisions.
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New UX Direction
In order to greatly improve our users satisfaction while staying in-line with the business goals we prioritized these tenets and deliverables to reach company goals:
- Help users focus on their tasks with the consolidation of user journeys into three main flows to efficiently engage with GPS Enterprise products.
- Take advantage of the new flows to create a more seamless experieince by using each flows' differing attributes while solidifying cohesion in the app throughout.
- In using “Simple Elegance” as our north star we were led to a more balanced look and feel.
- We chunked tasks into bite size morsels so as to never overwhelm users on their way to completing tasks and achieving their goals while giving them needed and consistent system feedback when they made changes to their criteria.
- The Web App to become adaptive down to tablets
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Who Are We Aiming For
Based on data provided by the client and interviews, we were able to distill two major users of the product to focus on:
Shanda, Emily, and Michael
Position: Marketing Consultants and Analysts
Company: Analytic Partners
Age: 25 - 35
Goals:- Partner with clients to understand their business objectives and provide analytic solutions to positively address client needs
- Ensure statistical models and all deliverables are of high quality and meet the internal quality control guidelines
- Drive analyses and insights that lead to more informed decisions and improved business performance
- Provide highly-customized, results-oriented analytics including marketing mix modeling, digital attribution, cross media attribution, pricing strategy, promotional effectiveness, forecasting and marketing optimization.
- Harmonize, process and analyze data to develop charts, reports and client presentations
Teresa
Position: Marketing Exceutive
Company: Microsoft
Age: 39
Goals:- Collaborate and review with AP team to understand analyses and insights that lead to more informed decisions and improved marketing program performance
- Generate graphs, charts and tables that can be incorporated in any report
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Setting The Product Foundation
User Journey
Keeping our major Personas in mind, we mapped their behavioral flow to understanding the activity of injesting data then gathering and reviewing insights for marketing spends.
Understanding their decision making and flow within the Marketing Mix Modeling experience led us to facilitate workshops with stakeholders in order to brainstorm the necessary features and opportunities required to successfully help users and the business meet their goals. Below is an example of the journey through Prophet.
Information Architecture
By analyzing the Marketing Analyst research journey we were able to focus on tasks users needed to complete for the initial MVP.
A content taxonomy map was created to give meaning to defined features
Site map to organize the pages, information, and navigation of the GPS Enterprise Suite of apps were created.
User flows were created to visualize key tasks within the product such as those that happen during Strategic Planning and Optimization process. By going through this flow of key tasks, it helped to think through most users core activity in this section and ensure a seamless process in extrapolating marketing analytic information for Analytic Partner users.
Wireframing
After getting into alignment with the stakeholders involved, we were able to begin sketching out and putting together a design system for the visual architecture of the product in order to bring the design to life.
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Bringing the Prducts to Life
Validation
Our OKRs were met as Analytic Partners was named a 2020 Leader in Marketing Measurement And Optimization Solutions and was top ranked in Strategy and Current Offering categories among all evaluated vendors by Marketing Measurement Industry Analysts Forrester and Gartner.
Assisted by a concentrated effort to lay down the groundwork and execution of UX/UI best practices, AP Analysts' and Consultants overall feeling was now the products were much more intuitive. As clients were becoming more exposed to the product, they commended AP for its services, strategic vision, and roadmap.
Through the analyst/client feedback-loop, the product now does a much better job of helping them to understand hard marketing questions and reinforcing the products key part of the marketing planning process.
AP received high marks for its more engaging and cohesive feel of its product offerings that dynamically integrates marketing performance data with geographic variations, customer behaviors, and sales channels to measure short-term revenue impact and long-term effects
