Alright, here's a short story of how I designed a low-touch wizard to simplify the process of generating target audiences for marketing campaigns.

My role

A Senior Product Designer, with a expertise in B2B Growth Design and Design System development.

area of Responsibility

I oversaw platform Settings area, Wizard for launching campaigns, and creation of target audiences. Also, I was in charge of the Design System, and end-to-end design for several PLG initiatives.

Company started as a cross-channel campaign launcher and rapidly grew to a large marketing SaaS.

Having joined as a product designer, I was tasked with the initiative to lower extremely high interaction costs on a platform, caused by rapid growth.

With active customers and analytics, we started looking at people’s behavior as a foundation for further improvements.

While solving the problem, we identified a significant growth opportunity, that led us to a new Product-Led Growth initiative.

We knew that we needed to get into the minds of different marketers, to truly understand their behavior at each step.

Customer interviews and close collaboration with data analysts showed us a full user journey that declared the order for changes.

Identifying high friction at audience flow, we also found it most used on the platform, including customers that solely were using this functionality.

Findings nudged us towards idea of a stand-alone product as a growth opportunity, which powered us to reimagine market standards and provide a new drastically easier way to create an audience.

Keeping eye on adoption I continued engaging with customers to identify new growth points.

Shortly we started getting the first users and nice interest from the marketing community, which allowed us to establish a feedback loop dedicated to the new product quickly.

Focusing solely on audience functionality, allowed me to identify ways of optimization and automation most of the manual steps.

Guiding Navigation

Looking at the data and talking to customers, made it clear that lots of people were having a hard time selecting audience criteria.

Interviews revealed that new PLG customers were way less advanced than main product customers, which meant us to answer the following questions with the help of UI - What order I should follow? Required vs optional fields? Difference between the criteria? What criteria composition makes my audience good?

Through a series of prototypes, we arrived at personalized 3-steps based navigation UI, separated by its semantic meaning.

Each step was clearly outlined, lowering cognitive load on the user, and providing more room for choosing criteria.

Criteria Selection

While hearing customers, technical limitations dictated reality we couldn't overcome. Huge databases couldn't be loaded fully, allowing users to select from available criteria, only a search-and-select approach was possible.

Looking for solutions I noticed patterns in usage data, outlining a few major segments that were using exactly the same criteria.

We segmented customers, and showed personalized, pre-loaded criteria in a chained step-by-step flow, making the decision-making process easier leading to a magical 95% completion rate.

This case is a good example of creative thinking, which helped bypass huge infrastructure rework for the sake of good experience.

" I feel uncomfortable having to select multiple criteria with search in between, and not seeing selected criteria once I start to search"

"Having save at the end makes me feel worried about losing selections, accidentally clicking outside"

"I find myself unaware of what's already selected, it's not visible until I save"

Well-established feedback loop allowed us to move fast, just in a few months, we enriched customers' experience with small but very impactful improvements, gaining loyalty and pleasant feedback across the network.

As a result interface communicates the current status, and effort needed to complete. Guides users at each step, and makes it possible to create a quality audience even for a non-marketer.

Audience Sources

Besides its own extensive databases, Metadata provides access to external sources for even more precise targeting results.

While users liked the idea of precision, a majority didn't have an idea what the difference is between sources and what they have to select within 25 available options, each time they create audience.

I believed it's a technical aspect that can be done under the hood, leaving a manual way optional for a small % of advanced users.

Implementing a dynamic aggregated layer on top of available sources, we ended up with 2 main options from the initial 25, automating this step for 90% of cases.

ICP Based Audience

As a Lead Designer in collaboration with the Dev team, we created a PoC, using Open AI API, that generates a criteria set using the provided Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) data. Now we just needed to set the correct ICP to get an audience with no clicks at all.

Handling ICP with onboarding we identify a secret ingredient that makes it possible to skip 90% of inputs and ask only info that we are missing. The ideal case would require customers to sign up, to get ready to use audiences.

Design System

To maintain consistency and ensure an efficient design process, I developed an adapted to our needs atomic design system with reusable components allowing them to be rearranged and combined with others while maintaining design consistency and recognizable UI patterns.

The design system played a vital role, aligning 4 UX engineers, and maintaining consistency across 5 stand-alone products, covering more than 150 unique pages

Handover

As I write this, we are implementing ICP based audiences. Here I handing over this "PLG child" to a design team, while shifting to other rising priorities and initiatives.

This project is a great example of how user-centric development can reveal opportunities, expand targeted audience, and even affect company strategy.

We made a significant leap, yet we still see ourselves at the beginning of our long journey.

Home

Scroll up

Contacts

Mail

Contacts

Mail

Contacts

Mail

Contacts

Mail

Back

Works

Contacts