Turning an internal toolset into a consumer friendly SAAS product

Oceanside10 is a market research firm with a history of building robust internal tools. DesignMap was approached to turn its these tools into a SAAS platform to sell to consumers.

They had built two products, a consumer research portal and an electronic marketing suite. Both had been built ad-hoc and needed an overhaul to meet the needs of contemporary consumers. 

My Role

I was the sole consistent design resource through two different phases, first to audit and update their marketing product, and then to re-envision their whole system. At various points throughout the project I worked with a design director, project manager, junior designer, and an intern.

Improving the marketing tools

The first phase was very fast and very narrowly focused on updating the creation experience.  This meant going through and untangling the steps necessary to create basic marketing campaigns, and then doing a page-by-page update to make the process more clear.

We began with a heuristic audit. Based on our research we created a series of designs intended to bring Oceanside10 in line with more modern marketing suites. 

A heuristic audit of the existing experience

An updated design for their email sending platform. 

Phase 2 : A strategic vision for the future

After delivering our initial set of designs we were called back for a thorough reimagining of the platform, starting with user research and initial personas. 

User research and initial personas

I worked with a design director and product manager to write a user interview script and determine key points we wanted to cover. After analyzing our interviews, we grouped user interview results into larger issues we could address with a ground-up redesign.

We developed personas based on internal and external users. Carl, our primary persona, was aspirational and based on Oceanside10's experience with their clients.

I created user flows to help our team imagine how our personas could use the software, without designing every screen.

I drew a set of storyboards to help Oceanside10 imagine a future where all their products were on a unified SAAS platform. This helped Oceanside see how their product would be used as a unified solution for a large company.

Demystifying a technical knowledge base

Because some of the concepts were so foreign to our team, I ended up building a lot of explainer diagrams to stabilize my understanding of the process. These successfully bridged the gap between design, engineering, and other non tehnical stakeholders to create understanding around the problems we were trying to solve for

Design and testing of initial prototypes

From there we worked on the vision, starting with sketches. 

The core of the experience was the list management dashboard. Oceanside10 wanted to unify research and marketing customer data into a fluid and flexible core repository. A typical user would manage customer segments and take different actions depending on their responsibilities as researcher or marketer. 

I created clickable prototypes out of our paper sketches. 

Sketches into mockups

Iteration and quick turnaround on sketches saved time before translating the work into mockups. 

Oceanside10's audience, technical marketers accustomed to combing through reams of customer data and connecting databases. 

I built a tool for hyper technical users

By the end of the project I came out with a strong opinion on how we could simplify the process of setting up data for less technical users. I ended up designing an expression builder, data import and attribute mapping, and data schema visualization screens and workflows.

Learn to speak Engineer

Throughout the project my willingness to learn and speak database engineer paid dividends. Patience and hard work was required to make sure that every tiny detail matched the target audience's impression of how tools should work. And at the end of day, it was worth it. Users and stakeholders loved our work, and the engineers were enthusiastic to get working on it. 

A robust tool becomes a comprehensive SAAS platform

1. Major revisions to the base marketing and email platform
2. A comprehensive vision for future work
3. In depth designs for technical database management and expression building

For the client, the project successfully communicated a vision where their internal tool could evolve to underpin a large marketing organization. It demonstrated that even technical interfaces need not look incredibly complex or overwhelming.