CAMPAIGN BUILDER REDUX: THE SAGA CONTINUES

BACKGROUND: Over 2018–2019, Paytronix rolled out a more self-service Campaign Builder to replace the not self-service Campaign Tool, so that users could build standard marketing campaigns without needing their Technical Consultant (TC) to set it up.

CHALLENGES: Campaign Builder was mostly ‘completed’ before I arrived at the company and it was designed by an outside marketing agency that did not typically build digital products. Development had taken at least a year longer than anticipated due to a variety of factors. As we were attempting to move it out of beta, we faced persistent bugs that needed more than a code fix. While she had only recently inherited the project, my [absolutely awesome] PM Tara understood that we needed to improve the experience as much as possible even though Campaign Builder was already considerably behind schedule. Both leadership and engineering teams were frustrated. The highest priority was to get the MVP out of beta and to all of our customers so we could then add advanced functionality that would bring it to parity with Campaign Tool.

SOLUTION: Identify opportunities to improve the experience that would not significantly impact existing scope. And when this wasn’t possible, we would phase the iterations across several releases. I knew we would have to wait to overhaul the complete tab-based structure, but there was opportunity to make a significant impact on the product’s overall usability.

SEGMENT TAB: THE BEFORE
(Including a baseline heuristic analysis.)

This is the segment tab, where the marketer would determine the audience that would be reached by their campaign.

Segment selection
This shows a draft campaign where a segment has already been added. But you wouldn’t know that — unless you scrolled to the left-most box beneath the table to read part of the existing segment’s name. And if you do that, you may wonder why its not shown as selected in the table. Wait. not only is it not even shown as selected in the table, its not even in the 10 (Seriously? Just 10 as a default?) shown when re-opening this tab.

There are radio buttons. As selectors. In a table. Yet nothing that is currently visible to me is selected, AND there was never a default selection.

Tables can say and do so much when we let them. Why is the only information I’m shown the name of the segment and the date it was created? This infers that the user will always know the name of any previously-created segment they wish to attach to a campaign. This flow mimics how a Paytronix TC or Data Insights (DI) specialist would build a campaign for a client, but marketers—our primary users—think differently. I had enough data in Pendo to show that roughly a quarter of our external users left Campaign Builder to enter the Account Filters section of the software just so they could get a closer look at what their saved segments contained. We needed to show information about the segment that could better inform the user as to whether or not they should target an existing audience with their current campaign.

Test Your Impact
Hold Out A Control Group gives me some information about what this slider does, but it looks like I have to click this tool tip to find out — wait, the tool tip isn’t clickable. Is it otherwise obvious that holding out a control group means not sending this campaign to a % of your designated audience? And should we assume that the user will understand when and why this would be useful?

The ability to randomly select a number of guests that will not be alerted about the campaign to see whether or not they would still come into the restaurant (or c-store) is an oft-touted feature of both leadership and the data insights team. The company’s president told me he wished more people used this feature and that if it were up to him, it would be on its very own page.

The slider is how the user controls the amount of guests who will not be notified of this campaign. In Campaign Tool, a TC or DI specialist could just type in any 00.00% they wished to hold out from campaign distribution. This slider allows whole percentages and prohibits input, unnecessarily dumbing it down for the marketer — and there is no apparent reason why this is the case.

SEGMENT TAB: THE AFTER

There were several constraints that limited how much I could overhaul within the complete Campaign Builder experience, but we still needed to bring it to relative parity with its predecessor, Campaign Tool, as well as add the ability to set a control group from an uploaded segment. Yet, with the support of our fantastic front-end product owner Ali, we were able to significantly transform this section.

Now leading with instructive copy
Every opportunity I have to redesign sections of the platform involve introducing standardized headers and subheads to explain the purpose of each section. I bandy about the ‘word’ figure-out-able quite often, but these are critical, necessary touches that increase user satisfaction while also decreasing the amount of time a Technical Consultant (TC) is forced to spend training and assisting our customers.

Displaying a table that informs
I eliminated the radio buttons and replaced them with a selector that’s activated when you click anywhere in the row — you can now also click on a row to unselect it and detach the segment from the campaign. But most importantly, I’ve made it easier for the user to decide which segment to use by including the audience size from the last time it was run and the person who created it.

Introducing a more intuitive way to set a control group
Once you’ve selected a segment, its name and estimated size appear in the right rail. Instead of using a nebulous slider to set a control group, the user may now manually input either an exact percentage (to the tenth) or whole number. Both marketers and internal users had also requested more granular control over this feature. Providing two options for manual input makes both primary and secondary users happy.

Additional improvements

Working to fix this product taught me a lot about doing the best I can to improve an experience without adding unnecessary scope. It would have been great to completely overhaul this entire section of the platform, but I focused only on what I could get immediate buy-in to do.