Acquia · 2020

Unified marketing cloud

One campaign, every segment, every channel

Acquia acquired two companies and wanted to merge three products, web personalization, email marketing and a customer data platform, into one marketing cloud. I led the design of the campaign builder at the center of it: a visual journey map where a marketer builds one campaign that reaches every segment on every channel.

Timeline: Feb – Dec 2020, ten months, alongside other projects
Role: Lead designer from start to finish: interaction design, visual design and project management, leading three junior designers and a researcher
Platform: Responsive web, designed with mobile in mind
Worked with: UX researchers, the director of machine learning, the director of engineering, the VP of product, product owners and the customer success team
Disclaimer: Please note that because of an NDA, I can only share more details in a private setting.

The final journey-map campaign builder: a Subscription Service Promotion Campaign drawn as nodes, from a segment through web personalization, email, a wait and a split to SMS and a segment update, with a library of audience, engagement, channel and flow-control nodes on the left and callouts naming what it fixes

Project overview

Acquia had bought two companies, and the business wanted their three products to become one marketing cloud: web personalization, email marketing, and a customer data platform. Each had grown up with its own idea of what a campaign was. I was the lead designer on the campaign work from start to finish, over ten months in 2020, with three junior designers and a researcher.

The year did not cooperate. The pandemic began a few weeks in, one of the main product managers left, then the VP of product left and a new one arrived, and there was no program manager. With that seat empty, scoping and sequencing the work became part of my job.

Web personalization

Email marketing

Customer data platform

Phase 1 · Feb – Jun 2020CampaignResearch, user stories, scoping, ideation, wireframes.
Phase 2 · Jul – Sep 2020CampaignUsability testing and the high-fidelity design of the phase 1 wireframes.
Phase 3 · Oct – Dec 2020AnalyticsResearch and design of analytics inside the builder.

Problem

A campaign could only use one segment and one channel, so three segments and two channels meant six campaigns, and none of them could be reused. Marketers were rebuilding the same thing by hand.

Solution

One campaign, built as a journey map. Segments, channels and decisions are nodes on a canvas, so a marketer draws the whole journey once and the suite runs it across every channel. Templates let the next campaign start from the last one.

The design process

Research
Define
Ideate
Test
Iterate

Research

Where the evidence came from

I started with what the company already had: past user interviews, the internal teams who talked to customers every day, old product documents, and a competitive analysis of the campaign tools our customers were comparing us against.

Office windows covered in sticky notes: columns of yellow notes under pink and green headers, the synthesis of the research against the Boston skyline — The synthesis went up on the windows: every finding on a note, grouped under the themes that kept coming back.

Mapping the system

Two whiteboards from the first weeks. One maps the three products as a loop: the customer data platform collects and scores, personalization acts, marketing automation executes, and campaign analytics feed back into what the marketer learns. The other turns the personas into workflows: a goal, its tasks, three to five subtasks each, and the process every campaign goes through, from plan to decide.

Whiteboard titled Marketing Cloud UX, phase 1: marketing automation, personalization and the customer data platform drawn as a loop with learn, act and collect on the arrows

Whiteboard: persona equals workflow, broken into goals, tasks and subtasks, beside the campaign creation process from plan to decide and a flow of boxes from cohort analysis to presenting results

Who it was for

Three personas: the campaigner who builds and sends, the analyzer who reads the results, and the data scientist or ML engineer who builds the models behind them. Customers spanned twelve industries, from consumer packaged goods and retail to government, health care and life sciences, so the builder could not assume one kind of campaign.

Consumer packaged goods
Education
Financial services
Government
Health care
High tech
Life sciences
Manufacturing
Entertainment and media
Non-governmental organizations
Retail
Travel

Every task, in one inventory

Before any sketching, I inventoried every user task and user story across the three products into one map, so the team could see the whole job rather than one product’s slice of it.

A spreadsheet titled MCU Product Mapping: each row a user story with its category, persona, acceptance criteria, research requests, function origin and MVP status — The product mapping: every story with its persona, its acceptance criteria, the research questions it raised, and whether it made the MVP.

Three pain points

Everything the research turned up came back to three things a campaigner could not do.

One segment, one campaignSeveral segments meant several builds

One channel, one campaignA campaign could use only one channel

Repetitive workAn existing campaign was hard to reuse

Define

Problem statement

As a campaigner, I’d like to run omni-channel campaigns for my business. One of many, but the one everything else hung on.

A campaigner is a designer

This was the idea that set the direction. A marketer planning a campaign is composing: who gets what, on which channel, after which event. So instead of a form that asks for a segment and a channel, the builder became a canvas, a journey map the campaigner draws node by node.

Fifteen wireframes in a grid, one use case screen by screen: campaign home, basic info, a template chosen, hovering a node, choosing a segment, configuring personalization, the email builder, configuring machine learning and a dynamic field, then choosing and configuring a metric — One use case, screen by screen: from the campaign home to a configured metric, the campaigner composes on a canvas with a library of parts, the way a designer works.

Ideate

Competitive analysis

Gartner’s January 2020 quadrant for digital experience platforms put Acquia among the leaders beside Adobe and Sitecore, with Salesforce the strongest challenger. So I went deep on Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder, down to how it handles goals: optional, one per journey, measured as a number or a percentage, and able to pull a contact out of the journey once it is met.

Workshop

A remote workshop with campaign managers. Each drew and labeled a complex campaign of their own, omnichannel if possible, then sorted its steps into planning, setup, marketing and wrap-up, so we could see where the products got in the way of the work as they actually did it.

From user stories to user flows

Every story from the inventory went onto a board by area, journey orchestration, analytics, landing page, grouping, goals, and each was marked: already covered by a flow, or needing a new one. Then we created user flows from the stories.

A board of user-story cards in rows for journey orchestration and analytics, with landing page, grouping and goals as groups; a colored dot on each card says whether a flow already covers it, a new flow is needed, or an existing flow could be expanded — The stories by area. Green: already in a flow. Red: needs a new flow. Orange: in a flow that could be expanded.

Flow F5, managing campaigns from the landing page: numbered steps from the campaign list through filters, search, archive and delete, with sticky notes holding the open questions — Flow 5, managing campaigns from the landing page, with the open questions pinned where they came up.

Test

Internal buy-in, then ten users

We tested with the internal teams first for buy-in, then to an external usability test with ten participants. Nine of ten finished the task on their own, and eight of ten said they were very satisfied with how the journey map works.

“Intuitive.”
An external tester

“Really excited about being able to create multi-segment, multi-channel campaigns.”
An external tester

What they told us to fix

They wanted to organize templates on their own terms.
Some interactions on the nodes were confusing.
The nodes needed better categorization.
Some nodes needed better labels.

Iterate

Before and after

The old flow asked for one segment and one channel in a form. The final design answers the three pain points directly: many segments and many channels on one map, and a campaign that can be reused.

Before: Acquia Lift’s Edit Mixed Campaign page, a form with rules, one A/B test targeted to a segment, and site variations with a traffic split — Before. A campaign was a form: one rule at a time, one segment per rule, site variations with a traffic split, and only the web.

After: the journey-map builder with callouts. A campaign can contain multiple segments and different channels, templates enable quick launch and reuse, analytics sit directly in the design, and the map makes the logic visible — After. One map holds many segments and many channels, a template starts the next campaign, and the logic is visible.

Improved node interaction

The test feedback went straight into the nodes: clearer categories, clearer labels, and interactions that did what people expected.

The node specification: hover, pressed and clicked states with edit and delete controls, unconfigured and configured nodes, a long name truncated, inline label editing, and the steps of connecting two nodes from hover to dragging the yes line onto the receiving node — Every state of a node, and the in-between states of connecting two of them.

Analytics on the map

Phase three put analytics into the builder itself, so a campaigner reads results on the same map they drew, instead of in a separate report.

A laptop showing the Analyze tab of the same campaign: the journey map with result cards on its nodes, segment size, web traffic, click-through, subscriptions and revenue, and a Goal Met badge — The Analyze tab. The results sit on the nodes of the map the campaigner drew.

Outcome

Nine of ten external testers completed the task on their own, and eight of ten were very satisfied with the journey map.

9 of 10

external testers finished the task on their own

8 of 10

were very satisfied with how the journey map works

Conclusion

Key takeaways

Collaboration is the key

With the product-management seat empty for months, the project held together because design, engineering, machine learning and customer success kept talking to each other, and the design team took on the scoping.

Show, then validate

Customers don’t always know what they want. They had never asked for a journey map; they asked for fewer campaigns. Showing them the idea and testing it is what made it real.

What I’d do differently

I would ship smaller pieces into the existing products sooner. We designed toward the unified suite, and customers on the current products waited for benefit that could have reached them in increments along the way.

Let’s connect

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