A journey review mode to increase marketer confidence when activating a digital campaign.
THEME
Emotional Experience Design
for SaaS product
DURATION
Oct 2019 - Dec 2019
7 weeks +
2 weeks for Execution
in Apr. 2020
ROLE
UX Designer
Interaction Designer
UX Researcher
TEAM
Lexie Li (end to end)
Penny Chiang (concepting)
Varna Das (concepting)
Salesforce sponsored our Experience Design Class and gave us a design brief:
Increase marketer confidence at the time of “activate” in Journey Builder (an application in Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
Regarding research, we face two main constraints in this project:
With these constraints, here are the methods we take to empathize marketers' situation:
Interview marketers and experts from Salesforce
Watch tool tutorials on Salesforce TrailHead
Generate metaphors
We synthesize the findings into a user journey map.
Analyzing our findings, we find that marketer's lack of confidence is from three aspects.
Journey Builder’s configurations are dispersed and hidden all over the marketing Cloud. This is the place you have the power to release everything but you can't see the setting of them.
Metaphor: It’s like you borrow musicians from different bands and let them perform together on the stage directly.
Solution: Rehearse. Check if every single part still looks good in the unity (within Journey Builder).
Creating personalized journeys at scale is by nature terrifying, everything has to be perfectly right.
Metaphor: It’s like a chef cooking a super complex course with 20 steps involved in the recipe, serving to millions of people.
Solution: An experienced chef would always taste to make sure everything is done right. Marketers could also check frequently throughout the process of executing the journey.
Campaign is planned by the team, but the execution of it is often done by one person. People feel less secure when they have to take team work by themselves. Here is how marketers deal with it:
Metaphor: When you solve a math problem, one way to get “fresh eyes” is to solve it again after a while and see if the result keeps the same. This is similar to what marketers do right now. Another more powerful way is to check it with different method or sequence than the first time working on it.
Metaphor: Think crafting a digital marketing campaign as building a brick wall, people need to follow a certain sequence when working on them.
Solution: If people look back to random pieces regardless of the original sequence, they will get “fresh eyes”.
We want to build a check mode for Journey Builder enabling marketers to review key configurations from all studios and unlock any part of the journey map by checking.
We hope the experience of checking to unlock the journey map is similar to unlocking the map in video game, which reassures marketer/player's achievement and brings them to the final celebrating moment step by step.
Variation 1 - Checklist panel
Variation 2 - Mouseover
Winner - Modal window
Variation 1 - Select two messages to specify a path
Flaws:
● There could be multiple paths between the two messages, which is complex.
● Marketers might need to check so many items for one path which is not productive.
Variation 2 - Click on paths directly to select
Flaws:
● Too many clicks.
● The path might not start or end with a message. It’s difficult to make sense of controls/activities without reviewing the message near them.
Winner - Select two adjacent messages to specify a path
● Only two clicks.
● Always start and end with a message.
● Always specify one path, no variations.
We come up with the basic structure and list out all UI components to be included:
Then we explore many layout variations:
We finalize with this layout:
Iteration 1: Users didn’t notice the Portals during testing, so we move the portals closer to the section title.
Iteration 2: Users clicked the Check button by mistake before they reviewed all content, so we disable the button until users click all tabs.
We increase marketers' confidence from three aspects:
If I have more time and resources...
Design variations for users who don’t have full access to SFMC
This checking mode invokes data from all tools within SFMC. However for users who only have access to certain tools, the experience might not be as seamless. Design variations invoking data from external source are needed.
Generate solid metrics for evaluation
Since this is an emotional experience design prompt, traditional data used for evaluating usability is not the best metrics for this solution. If possible, we will work with user research experts at Salesforce to come up with some qualitative metrics for this design.
From this project I understand why generative metaphor is an essential component in design thinking reasoning. Design problem is by nature wicked, which means there is no exact existing solution for it that designers can borrow. On the other hand, this also means that designers could technically borrow ideas from anything, since everything is connected in some way. When designers reframe the initial problem into some other ones that seem irrelevant but actually connected, that's when metaphors are generated.
As UX designers we are used to fix small points within a user flow to address usability issues. It affects how users behave, but it doesn't necessarily affect how users feel. This design brief is a great example of emotional problem. Even our product enables users to do everything accurately, if users don't feel they have done everything right, then we still fail to provide good user experience. To fulfill emotional need, we need to take a holistic look at users' life rather than focusing on the product only.
Heartfelt thanks to Salesforce UX Team (Craig Birchler, Jadsdeep Chugh, Sarah Flamion, Nic True, Steve Voyk) for providing this challenging, thoughtful design brief and mentoring our class with inspiring feedbacks throughout this project. Many thanks to the professor Jeffrey Bardzell for instructing this amazing Experience Design class. Last but not least, I want to thank Lexie Li, Penny Chiang and Varna Das for being amazing teammates.
