Victorious, a premier SEO Agency, launched their Beta Campaign Roadmap feature with a goal to transparently communicate their strategies, actions, and measurable impact on customer campaign growth. Partnering with Product and Engineering, I led the end-to-end design of the Campaign Roadmap feature, focusing on simplifying complex data and improving user engagement. This case study highlights the design process and outcomes for the customer-facing experience, emphasizing clarity, usability, and value delivery.
UX Designer
Kevin Wallner, Product Manager
Tyler Tran, UX Manager
Jan '23 - May '23
(4 months)
In the dynamic SEO landscape, Victorious faced challenges with complex and convoluted campaign management processes that relied heavily on vague Asana boards, leading to low renewal rates and dissatisfied customers. To improve transparency, customer experience, and long-term success, a more flexible and user-focused solution was essential.
Our goal was to launch with an MVP that would simplify the way customers manage and view their campaign, ensuring effortless access to SEO deliverables and up-to-date schedule of services. This would lead to higher Net Promoter Scores and increased revenue from package upgrades and expansions.
We introduced a Campaign Roadmap feature that serves as a centralized hub for customers to comprehensively oversee their dynamic campaign. It enables users to easily track services, access all deliverables in a single location, and stay informed about service and campaign enhancements.
This outcome was achieved by implementing the Campaign Roadmap as a core feature during the app's launch which completely removed the need for customer-facing Asana boards. We will continue to monitor long-term metrics for how the feature impacts Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and Net Promotor Scores (NPS).
With just four months to take this feature from conception to developer hand-off, I had to make calculated compromises throughout the design process to meet the tight deadline.
With no defined design system, all designers started from scratch, creating new design patterns as needed. This required frequent cross-team communication.
My focus was to understand the impact of our existing tools and processes on customers and campaign health. Understanding why these elements struggle to scale with our company would be crucial for organizing the feature.
We began our research by interviewing 5 Customer Success Managers so that they could walk us through how they setup and utilize customer-facing Asana boards. This gave us insight on root problems and opportunity gaps.
We then conducted 5 customer interviews to gain quantitative and qualitative data that could help identify areas of opportunity.
We synthesized our research findings and uncovered the following insights:
Only 20% of customers regularly use Asana boards, as they lack the tools needed to track deliverables effectively and understand their impact on campaign success.1/24o
100% of customers have misplaced emailed deliverables at least once. Additionally, confusing Google Drive hierarchies and naming conventions compounded the issue, leading to extra work for CSMs and increasing customer dependency on them.
Customers' limited SEO knowledge and unfamiliarity with service terminology leave them unclear about ongoing work and its impact, thereby reducing awareness of expansion opportunities.
The gradual nature of SEO growth often falls short of customers' 12-month ROI expectations, leading to reluctance in renewing contracts.
“Google Drive folders don’t have much organization to them and I don’t use Asana very often because it’s not clear as to what’s happening right now. I just trust the CSM to tell me what's coming up in the pipeline.”
– Jacklyn, Marketing Manager (Victorious Customer)
Because I was concurrently solving overlapping and user-specific problems for internal users, I defined the following overarching design principles that would apply to both user types:
Through multiple rounds of brainstorming and sketching sessions, I began explorations into page layout and functionality.
As a user on the Campaign Roadmap, I can:
As a user on the Campaign Roadmap, I can:
Cycle through for a snippet of my explorations
Collaborating with stakeholders, we determined that implementing an infinite scroll feature would effectively communicate the idea that SEO is an ongoing, strategic partnership requiring continuous attention and collaboration that goes well beyond the 12-month timeframe.
Integrating features that enable users to monitor and assess their services and deliverables transforms a formerly static schedule into a dynamic experience. Offering a holistic view on their evolving campaign allows users to naturally recognize the added value of campaign enhancements and upgrades.
Users can scroll into the future to view and learn about planned services.
Users can review, accept, or request a revision on deliverables.
When web implementation tasks have been completed, users can confirm that they've done their part.
To provide transparency into what is being actively worked on, what's been done, and what's upcoming.
As a ‘scrappy startup,’ we embraced learning on the fly. But when an unexpected company re-org collided with scope creep and tight deadlines, it became clear we needed to hit pause and re-evaluate our priorities.
Despite sharing my designs frequently amongst the Product team, stakeholder presentations weren't held as often. Faced with an extensive list of requirements and tight deadlines, we scheduled recurring stakeholder meetings to stay focused and reprioritized P0 items to later phases, easing technical scope and managing deadlines.
Drag the divider to see the iterated designs before and after stakeholder feedback
By limiting the service statuses to 'In Progress' and 'Delivered', users can easily understand what work is currently being done and what has been completed.
Instead of showing a detailed explanation of each service within the service drawer, Knowledge base links are included on the Available Services panel and within service drawers to help reduce information overload.
This allows users to learn more about offered services and how they impact a campaign, encouraging conversations with their CSMs which can lead to upgrades.
Users can easily locate deliverables within the respective service drawers.
One of our biggest compromises was to forego customer usability tests and instead test with 10 internal employees for UAT purposes. The goal was to stress-test the designs to ensure that all tasks were completed with minimal to no friction deeming it ready for customer launch.
9 out of 10 users rated the feature as a pass and ready for customer launch.
With some minor iterations on microcopy and microinteractions, the Campaign Roadmap received it's stamp of approval and was almost ready for launch.
Working closely with the Dev team, I continue to help with design and dev QA testing to ensure the quality of our product is at its best. I am also contributing to a QA test case master list in preparation for regression testing.
Through user research, we learned that 3 out of 5 customers utilize their mobile devices to access important SEO updates throughout the week; thereby enforcing the need for a mobile version of this feature.
Although this may see obvious, but our biggest compromise was not testing with customer users. With this in mind, our team is ready to tackle and feedback we get on improving the usability.
With the thrill and excitement of starting a brand new feature, it's collectively easy to lose sight of your MVP. I learned (the hard way), that keeping things lean is the best way to stay in scope and on schedule. It can be nerve wracking to challenge a new idea that would add more scope, but going about it with empathy and respect allows for open and honest discussions with your team members and stakeholders.
