Product Ask

Design a new industry standard* multi-step campaign building experience for Simon that allows for flexible and complex cross-channel (eg. SMS, email, push) marketing.

*The concept of multi-step campaign building is in almost all modern customer experience marketing products. Product felt it was necessary for us to not simply iterate on the bones of the old product, but to build a completely new experience to be able to meet industry standard.

Existing Product

Given high adoption of the existing product, I decided doing a quick audit + reading through previous user feedback would help me narrow down the scope of my initial research. I worked with the Product Manager closely to understand the known user frustrations.

Rigid validation

Users could not save any forms without filling out all the necessary fields, which made it impossible to edit and save works in progress.

Unclear UI

Even though a graph for a campaign might look simple, each step would hide details about the logic of the campaign that made it difficult to understand what the campaign was supposed to do at first glance.

Old campaign builder graph view.
Clicking into one of the boxes on the graph pulls you out of the experience into this page with configurable settings.

Research

We spoke to 5 marketers to understand how they approach campaign building. Key learnings were as follows.

Single Step vs Multi Step

Marketers have very different goals for multi step campaigns from single step messaging. They often found multi-step campaigns to be more difficult to set up. 

Fear of “Messing Up”

Marketers have an innate fear of messaging the wrong people at the wrong time. They are meticulous about testing and triple checking details of a campaign before its launch date.

External Documents

Marketers would often create multiple documents using external tools such as Lucidchart or Google Slides to sketch out the logic before working in Simon. They used these to share out to other members of the team for approval.

Average Build Time

Marketers would take a long time (often weeks) to ideate, build, and test multi-step campaigns. Friction in the tool made this process even longer, leading to frustration and fear that they would not meet the launch date.

User Journey

Using the learnings from interviews, I mapped out a user journey with corresponding user intent/feelings for each step. This helped the team understand exactly what part of the existing workflow our product will touch.

A map of the typical user journey for a marketer. Certain steps are annotated with pain points and insights from the user interviews.

Design Goal

From the research and exercises above I set a design goal for myself to aim towards as I designed this new experience.

Create a builder experience that more closely models how users design a multi-step campaign in their mind. Create a frictionless UX that allows users to be empowered by their tools, not hindered.

Solutions

Mind Map

We broke out the logic of a campaign set up into smaller chunks that would be visually represented on the graph as nodes. By dragging and dropping these nodes on the graph, users could more closely mirror their thought process and work more freely in the product.

Different types of "steps" that users can use in the campaign graph to build their journey.
A simple drag and drop experience which allows users to control the graph freely.

Maintaining Context

All settings and information about individual campaign nodes, such as reporting + metrics or configurations, would be surfaced to the user in a side drawer format so the user could maintain context of what they are working on the whole time.

Users are able to switch between the configurations of the campaign vs. reporting details easily.

Review Before Launch Workflow & Safe Iteration

A review mode allows users to share their work in progress or the results of an ongoing campaign to select members of their team without fear of configurations being altered.

In view mode, the configurations are viewable but not editable.

Once a campaign has launched, users could safely iterate on the same campaign by versioning their work. Once they launch the new version, all qualifying customers of the campaign will automatically be routed to the new set up of the campaign.

Multiple versions can be managed separately as the user constantly iterates based on the learnings of previous versions.

User Testing

We held simple user testing sessions with the previous prototype with 5 select users to catch any glaring usability issues.

An excerpt of the script used for user testing.

Unexpected Navigation

Users of our product had become so used to the controls of Journeys (scroll) that they had trouble understanding the infinite canvas navigation at first.

We also saw some misclicks on non-interactable elements (eg. “I expected this to open this”) which we were able to correct.

Language

We found users trying to match features in our new product with our single campaign product (eg. “is active hours like send windows?). We consolidated the language between the products to make onboarding simpler.

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Looking Forward

Beta & Feedback

Our beta users were selected based on their activity in the product. We had periodic check-ins with our users and their CS counterparts to document and prioritize feedback.

Google sheet managed by the CS reps and product manager to collect feedback on the product.

Migration

One of the unexpected blockers to adoption has been clients’ unwillingness to migrate campaigns from the previous version of Journeys to the new one. We had initially decided a migration tool was unnecessary given the small number of multi-step campaigns running per client, and the faster build time, but that proved to be wrong. 

The team is slated to start exploring auto-migration tools for our existing clients later this year.

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