Evergage Product Personas 
To define the users I collaborated with the Customer Success team and CTO to create 7 Evergage product personas.

Ongoing User Feedback
I kept a strong relationship with the other departments and was informed of their user feedback and pain points. By means of periodically attending CS and Support team meetings, hallway talk, support tickets, and scheduled interviews about specific accounts and users. 

User, Team, and Company Profiles
I created these profiles to document the important information such as goals, measure of success, org structure, responsibilities, cross channel interaction, how well the company trusted our data, and more. I collected the information from previous user tests, my ongoing user feedback, Salesforce, and Evergage on Evergage.

Basic Platform Personas

• Technical campaign builder and strategic campaign builder (Campaign Implementation)

• Manager to drive personalization strategy

• Analyst

• Executive

Feature Specific Personas

• Email Marketer - For the companies that used our email campaigns.

• Merchandiser - For companies that used Evergage to manage and optimize their inventory

User problems

• Analysts and strategic personas had trouble finding critical data and reports about their business, products, and users.

• Analysts and strategic personas spent hours each day collecting campaign data. 

  • To get the data for each campaign clients were tediously clicking one level further into each campaign to the campaign stats.

• Managers had difficulty organizing and managing their campaigns.

• Campaign implementation personas spent extra time finding campaign details.

• Everyone had difficulty finding pertinent features.

• Strategic and implementation personas spent extra time finding campaigns, especially across channels.

Business problems

The CS team had trouble with client engagement and on-boarding and the Sales team had difficulty selling the power of the platform because of the following:

• The platform was very busy and overwhelming for clients and prospects.

• The platform didn’t tell a cohesive story.

• Prospects didn’t trust the power because the UI in their opinion was outdated.

We were still moving at a rapid pace and needed to address the problems as quickly as possible. The feedback was targeted at the most impactful areas of the platform - the navigation and the campaign list screen. The problems were turned into goals and broken into two large projects to focus on those two areas. Click on the project header to read the stories. (password: bVKevZ@9b8)

Navigation Redesign

The navigation was five sections and it was clear that the structure was no longer effective for our current and future users and product growth.

Project Goals

• Reorganize the navigation and platform

• Expose important data and reports

• Make it easier to find pertinent features and functionality

• Solve the problems in a way that works for each persona

• Improve the styles

My Impact - This was a collaboration with the UX Director. I applied my knowledge of the user, business, and platform, intuition, and design thinking to improve the information architecture, while she focused on the styles.

Overall the project went well and was very impactful for the users, product growth, and company.

Impact

1. Resulted in signing numerous high revenue and high opportunity clients.

2. Increased client renewal rate of target clients about 70%.

3. The UI helped the Sales and CS team tell a better product story resulting in increased sales and client retention.

4. Product team successfully added new features after the release.

5. An influx of positive client feedback and reported better ease of use.

6. Completed my personal initiative of successfully involving the user throughout the whole process.

What Would I Do Next Time

1. Spend more time on the problem definition. We just did a quick fix that did solve most of the problems, but if we took time to look at each problem, the platform holistically, and did more research we could have created a stronger platform.

2. Define the measure of success and measure the results.

How I leveraged user research to redesign one of the most impactful screens to satisfy the needs of our different target personas.

My Role: Design lead, product design, user research & project management

Team: CTO (Product manager/head of product), UX Director, 20 engineers.

Tools: Axure, Google docs, GoToMeeting, Jira, whiteboard

Skills Demonstrated: Design thinking, user research, interaction design, visual design, collaboration, wire framing, leadership

Previous UI

New UI

 Impact

1. An influx of positive client feedback reporting better ease of use.

2. Analysts and strategic personas noted that it took them less time to gather campaign data.

3. Completed my personal initiative of successfully involving the user throughout the whole process.

1. Feature Requirements

The first step was to define the feature, including the technical, business, and feature requirements, target users, common use cases, and questions. As the design lead, I created the feature doc that held this information and was responsible for the upkeep.

2. Understanding The Users’ Needs

There were some assumptions and user feedback about this screen, but we needed more of a direct and relevant understanding of how the clients were using this screen. I reviewed my previous research and then conducted user interviews. I had limited time to spend on the interviews so my primary focus was to validate we were solving the right problems and get a better understanding of how each persona was using the screen.

3. User Interviews

I conducted 6 user interviews over GoToMeeting with our top power users across industries and use cases. I worked with the CTO and Customer Success to select users, worked with the CS team and clients to schedule the calls, determined the goals of the study and method, moderated the sessions, analyzed the findings, and added the findings to the user, team, and company profiles for future projects and insights.

4. Applying Insights to the Designs

The user interviews provided valuable insights. I analyzed the data and applied what I learned to start designing the first iterations. The three main takeaways were as follows:

1. The strategic users confirmed that they needed more data.
   The validation meant we would add more data in the columns. In order to add more data I created more space for the columns. To create this space we decided to create collapsible folders and moved the location and orientation of the details panel from the right side to the bottom.

2. Validated the need for customization.
   Each individual user, team, and organization had different responsibilities and goals. The implementation personas were focused on the campaign details and history, the strategic personas were focused on the data, and the strategic campaign builder was focused on both. The revenue tracking clients wanted revenue data and those that weren’t wanted conversion and clickthrough rates. This insight led me to look into solutions to customize the experience. I tried different solutions (explained below in design iterations)

3. Strategy and organization ranged from team to team.
   Some teams organized their campaigns based on the campaign builder, the type of promotion, the intent of the campaign, or the campaign status. The level of organization ranged from little organization to a flawless system. This variety led me to design a solution that included both subfolders and an additional tagging system to then test to see what resonated with the users.

5. Design Iterations

I created the first iterations of the screen in Axure RP.  For the first iterations I cleaned up the columns to create as much space as possible. I started by making the screen customizable because it was critical for this screen to be effective for each persona since it’s a critical screen. I tried out two variations where the columns changed based on a toggle or sliding columns (outlined in red).

Context - This project was closely tied to another feature enhancement that involved the detail panel (covered). There are other artifacts from that feature mixed into this screen, for example the rocket ship icon.

6. Second Design Iteration

The two column options didn’t allow for enough flexibility and I needed to find a solution that allowed for more options. At that point I went back to the white board, researched similar UI structures, and looked for inspiration. I found inspiration from the concept of a custom workspace and custom boards found in Jira and YouTrack. The idea was to allow for multiple column options, we called “views,” by adding a drop down to the left that allowed the user to change the data in the columns based on their needs. The idea started out as the ability to be completely customizable. The next steps were to test that theory on the users.

I believed that creating views was the best solution to allow the different personas to achieve their goals on this screen. I presented my idea to the CTO and UX Director and leveraged the user insights to gain buy in and approval. The main hesitation was this would take double the engineering time to build, but the benefits I outlined outweighed the cost.

With the approval I moved forward with tackling the rest of the design goals. This included the following:

• A robust search bar to help users find campaigns

• Added more data, which included filters from the campaign statistics screen

• Tags and subfolders

• Callouts with more granular data

7. User Testing

There was a lot of new functionality and I wanted to see how the users would interact with the new designs, identify any problem areas, and understand what worked and what didn’t. I conducted 6 user tests over GoToMeeting with the same users who were interviewed at the start of the project. For the tests I created an interactive mockup in Axure and asked the participants to complete a few tasks, answer a few questions and then I left time for an open dialogue.

8. Applying Insights to the Designs

Overall, the tests went well. The two main takeaways were the following:

1. The clients were excited about the changes especially the views, search bar, and added data.
   They told me how much the changes would improve their productivity. With the positive feedback on these features I moved forward with scoping the feature. I discussed technical restrictions with the CTO and made some changes. For the first version the views couldn’t be customizable, but we had decided to provide four built in options based on the user research. We also needed to limit the statistics filters to two and remove the added details on hover.

2. There were mixed feelings about adding a tagging system.
   Some clients were ecstatic about the tags, but some were very against them and said they would add unnecessary clutter. I considered this feedback in context of the rest of the project. We were making a ton of large changes and since people are generally reluctant to big change, I thought that adding a feature we knew would be negatively received wasn’t good. This could be added in the future after further investigation when we had more time to design the feature to really work.

Then I worked with the team to make the styles look cleaner, simpler, and more consistent.

• Changed the folder and campaign list row styles from alternating white and gray to all white with a gray separating line.

• Changed the row headers to a gray with a subtle gradient and made the folder header the same style.

• Cleaned up spacing, including reducing the spacing between the icons and the edge of the row.

• Updated the filter icon (black down arrow) on the campaign list columns to show an ellipsis icon on hover.

• Changed the font from Arial to Helvetica.

The Final Designs

Click through the carousel to see the four different views. Each view changes the information in the columns.

9. Implementation

The engineers were closely involved in this redesign and were already building the framework as I was designing. The pass off was this final design iteration. We had weekly design meetings with the lead front-end engineer so we could address any issues or design challenges.

10. Beta Testing

This was a major change and I wanted to ensure the users were on board with the entire redesign. The change was released on a separate engineering server. Through 8 users tests, I was able to determine that this was a positive change overall.

Retrospective

By involving the user throughout the process, the team and I were able to create a positive and impactful change for the business, platform, and users.

Impact

1. An influx of positive client feedback reporting better ease of use.

2. Completed my personal initiative of successfully involving the user throughout the whole process.

3. Analysts and strategic personas noted that it took them less time to gather campaign data.

What Would I Do Next Time

1. More time spent on the user research to understand more about how the users were interacting with the screen. There was a ton of interactions that could have been optimized, like the search bar, detail panel, and the collapsible folder.

2. Customize the whole screen and not just the columns. There is opportunity to customize the detail panel and filter options which could further optimize efficiency for the different personas.

3. Involve the user throughout the process, this was crucial and I would make sure to do this again.

Project Description

This project was to add advanced functionality to Evergage’s Recipe Simulator aka machine learning testing tool. The recipes (custom machine learning algorithms) are used to output personalized recommendations for targeted users for email and web campaigns. These need to be tested before the campaign containing the recipe is pushed live. The Evergage support team used an internal tool to manually create target users and test the output. In order for a prospect to sign, they needed this functionality to be automatic and in the product.

With a tight deadline of “yesterday”, I was able to use my UX best practices and design thinking skills to make sure this powerful tool was properly designed and released.

Context: Evergage provides advanced machine learning for businesses to recommend products, categories, and other content to personalize their visitors’ experiences. The recommendations can be customized with a variety of settings such as trending, show similar items, user affinities, or specific brands or categories through the creation of “recipes.” The recipes are added into our campaigns to personalize recommendations. Recipes must be tested to ensure they were set up properly and working correctly.

Impact

• The above mentioned prospect signed

• The feature was useful for current clients and internal support teams

• There was a boost in moral as the Customer Success team and Director of Learning felt prepared and in the loop

• Achieved the goal of creating a more effective and deeper testing deeper

• The sales team was able to sell and showcase the recommendation system

Project Team 3 Engineers, CTO (product manager, head of product), UX Director, Director of Learning and Development

My Role Product Designer, Project Lead

Tools Axure RP, White board, Evergage, Jira, Google Docs

Skills Demonstrated Interaction design, user flows, collaboration, initiative, leadership, visual design

Previous UI

New UI

The Story

1. The Beginning

   Identified the need and requirements - For this feature, all of the requirements were set by the CTO and executive team. The internal Evergage team had already built similar functionality but they need to make it more automatic.

   Initial design sketches - The CTO white boarded his solution in our weekly design meeting.

   High fidelity mockup - The UX Director was assigned the project and transferred the white board sketches verbatim into Axure RP.

   Hand off to the Engineers - The designs were handed off to the two engineers to start building. She went on vacation and I was the design lead for the project while she was away.

   2. QA Designs — *where my involvement starts*

   I always check the basic interaction and user flows, for example, how do you add, edit, and delete? What does it look like when nothing is created? What are the common use cases? What are the edge cases? If it’s a new concept or feature I try to make sure the user has the support to understand how to use the feature, for example do they need helper text, a callout with more info, or support docs?

   The designs that were handed off to me didn’t answer any of these questions.

   3. White boarded the modified solution

   We discovered that there were some structural requirements and concepts that weren’t defined, which left holes in the design and the experience. For example, the relationship between a test group, adding a user, and the recipe was not clear. This type of check and design thinking is something I’ve recognized as a gap in the design team and process and had made efforts to improve.

   I collaborated with the engineers to white board a modified solution that would account for the user flows, interactions, and define the relationship between the new concepts. It was important to get the engineers involved to ensure I understood the technical limitations and they understood the user requirements. See my changes below.

First Round High Fidelity Mockups

Edits to Mockup

4. Documented the feature & added organization

I created a working feature requirement doc in Google docs for the team which contained all the requirements, definitions, questions, user flows, and eventually the burn down list. It was essential to document and stay on the same page, especially because we were on a tight time schedule. The three of us met for an additional daily team scrum to sync up.

5. New high fidelity mockups

I moved the new white board design solution into Axure RP. I worked on my design check list and improved the visual design. This included checking that the elements and styles were consistent, i.e the “add user” icon was the same for both random and specific user, as well as check the hierarchy and spacing. Then moved to the smaller interactions like the different hover states, deleting a user, deselecting a filter, etc. Highlighted in the designs are some of the specific interaction areas I focused on and enhanced.

6. Design Implementation

I handed off the designs to the two engineers. One focused on the back end and the other on the front end of the feature. I worked closely with both, especially the front end dev. This was a very interactive screen and with little time I had to hand over the designs with enough of the interactions accounted for. While they were building I was working through some of the known outstanding interaction questions, and was available for support as they discovered new interaction issues.

7. Release Plan

This was an impactful feature and a drastic change which meant that the Customer Success team really needed to prepare to talk to their clients and the users needed to have support. Communicating releases has been a pain point between the departments and is something I’ve worked on improving.

For this project I took advantage of leading the project and implemented a successful release plan. This included working with the the Director of Learning to produce adequate support documentation, communicating with the Customer Success through email and quick updates in team meetings to keep them apprised of the changes and the shifting release time line, and working with the CTO to add an informational tour and in app message explaining the feature.

Tool Tip Explainer Message

Email Correspondence to the Customer Success Team

Retrospect & Take Aways

Through attention to interaction design and an effective communication release plan I was able to help the team implement a successful feature enhancement.

Impact

• The above mentioned prospect signed

• The feature was useful for current clients and internal support teams

• There was a boost in moral as the Customer Success team and Director of Learning felt prepared and in the loop

• Achieved the goal of creating a more effective and deeper testing deeper

• The sales team was able to sell and showcase the recommendation system

Project Description

Evergage is a cloud based web software and we wanted to move into the mobile space. The project was to create an MVP mobile version of our web platform. The three main goals were the following:

1. Quickly disable or publish a campaign

2. Check the health of the campaigns by viewing the campaigns statistics

3. Check the overall health of the website by viewing the reports dashboard for account with and without revenue tracking on their site.

Impact

1. Evergage launched into the mobile space

2. When this was released a few clients used the app

My Role Lead Designer

The Team Lead engineer, a junior product manager, and myself

Tools Sketch, Youtrack, Google Docs

1. Define requirements

For this project the team met to determine the requirements.At the time Evergage had four major sections - Segments, Campaigns, Reports, and Catalog. We decided it was best for the MVP to just focus on Campaigns and Reports.

2. Ideation & Sketches

We mapped out the user workflows and determined which screens were needed to achieve the three main goals. Then, I went through the user flows to determine what information was necessary and asked questions about each screen. The team looked into the differences and nuances of mobile. There were two main challenges designing for mobile vs desktop.

1. Distilling the feature down to a simpler version and minimizing the feature and information on the screen. To solve that we used toggles, added more depth to the screens, and reduced the information on the screens.

2. Using the space a different way and understanding the different user interactions. One of the main one was a touch screen vs click screen. With the curser had more options to both right and left click and use a hover state, whereas with mobile you only have the ability to touch (click). We removed hover states and added clickable

3. Design

I created high-fidelity mockups in Sketch from the wireframes. To create a cohesive design I created a style guide for the mobile elements. Below are the four workflows that achieved the four project goals.

4. Development & Release

Implementation

I handed the designs off to the engineer. We continued to check point and work through any UX, visual, and interaction design questions or challenges.

Release

This release was fast and unfortunately we had to move onto the next project right away. If I had time, I would love to track how people were using the feature and validate from the users.

Project Description

The Company, Evergage, is a customer data and personalization platform that by nature collects and stores data. A Segment is a group of users who are defined by specific rules or parameters such as location, revenue, and affinities that the Evergage user sets up in the platform. This project was the redesign of the segment statistics screen to help users identify business opportunities to increase revenue, loyalty, and conversion rates. The segment statistics screen is crucial because it holds a ton of valuable info about the most important users of the platform.

Impact

This feature wasn’t implemented yet so the direct customer impact is not available.

1. Potentially increase revenue and loyalty for clients

2. Potentially our clients would use Evergage for more of their data and analytics

3. This project helped our CTO (head of product / product manager) conceptualize what we could do in the product.

4. Exposed all the data we had in our platform and optimal ways to slice it.

Role Lead Designer, Researcher, Project Manager

Project Team Lead Architect, CTO(product manager, head of product), Customer Success Team

Tools Axure RP, Evergage, Google Docs, Jira, HighFive

Skills Highlighted UI/Visual Design, Data Visualization, Startup Experience, Collaboration, Simplifying a Complex Problem

Current Screen

Redesign

Designs Explained

I was on a small product team and needed to take on different tasks. In this situation, to design effectively I had to understand and sometimes collect a ton of different information including our clients’ business strategies and goals, Evergage’s evolving strategy and platform, and our growing user base and their goals. There were over 300 clients across many different industries, company sizes, team sizes, and maturity levels. Evergage displayed tons of data that was either collected or integrated. In order to create the designs I had to deeply understand our clients’ businesses. We had to understand the above mentioned information.

Design Decisions

Historical Data Comparison

No Comparison

This is a very crucial part of any project. Reflection helps strengthen your skills by acknowledging the knowledge you’ve gained and the lessons you’ve learned. It also allows you to understand what went well so you can use those aspects for future projects, and identify the areas of improvement.

Skills Strengthened and Gained

Data Visualization to Simplify a Complex Problem

• I focused on the common use cases and accounted for the specific use cases. I was working with a ton of data that could have been spliced and displayed in countless interesting ways. For example, we collect what we call “catalog” data that includes, purchase, view, add to cart data for each item, category, brand, and affinity.

• The data needs to be displayed in a way that is both visually appealing and comprehensive. As humans we enjoy designs visually pleasing to the eye yet we need to be able to interpret the data.

• There aren’t any pie cards used because they are more “eye candy” than functional because a person can’t accurately compare the parts to each other.

• Histograms were used for the cadences because they are best for showing frequency and large amounts of data and can expose outliers and gaps.

• I had to understand of all the data, all the ways it could be sliced, how it could be used to find opportunities, the user’s and how they would interact with the design.

Collaboration

• CTO - Use cases, how the feature fits into the rest of the platform, and design critiques

• UX Director (my design counterpart) - design critiques

• Lead Architect Engineer- what data we’re pulling and how we can slice it

• The Customer Success Team(CS) - user interviews for insights and feedback, emails for feedback, and on a regular basis to keep the team in the loop I presented the feature’s progress during the CS team’s reoccurring meetings.

• Evergage Retail Strategist - user interviews for insights and feedback

Improved CS and UX team feedback loop
To strengthen the relationship between the UX team and the CS team I worked with specific CS team members and the CCO to improve the time sensitive feedback loop. When the UX team needs feedback right away we set the expectation that it would be in a form of a very direct and thorough email template that outlined what was needed, when it was needed by, what was the project, and what type of feedback was needed. Initially, I was apprehensive to send such a direct email because I didn’t want to come off as rude or cold, but it helped to set the expectations and have the CS team involved in the process.

Startup Experience
At any given point during this project I was working on at least one other major feature design, a smaller design assignment, a team improvement project, and providing general design support. The pace was very fast and the projects constantly shifted. This called for excellent prioritization and organization.

What I Would Do Differently

I would create a simple display of the most important metrics with the purpose of the user understand the health of the segment at a high level before diving in. This would simplify the data even more and allow the analysts to dive in without overwhelming the other users.