^ Up : EMM EMMPower Marketing Platform
Business Goal
UsableXperience was asked by EMM Group, a top marketing consulting firm, to help design a collaborative Marketing/Campaign management platform that focused on collaboration and content management. The platform was designed to be used by marketing departments in enterprise corporations as a web application. The types of users who would use the product were positions like Brand managers, Campaign managers, business marketers and external ad agencies. Users would then collaboratively manage various documents like Brand Vision, Voice of the Customer, and Ad/Campaign Plans among other documents.
Design Solution
EMM Group started with basic requirements and some paper sketches and gave UsableXperience (UX) the freedom to create a structure from just the product requirements. The product managers had a deep understanding of the marketing/advertising campaign process and the actors involved. Potential users of this platform were likely to be less technically-oriented and needed a very robust yet intuitive user experience. Users needed to be able to accomplish such tasks as highly functional document management, routing, generating a report, and creating a taxonomy. In addition, workflows would need to be configurable and modifiable and users would need to be able to easily categorize and retrieve assets by geography, target segment, and product type. Furthermore, users would need to be constantly updated with industry and company news and workflow items so a portal-like personal page was added to the designs. Other pages would be used to administer the system by a much more technical user type, i.e., the administrator. These pages would need to be more powerful and quick to reach functionality.
Benefits
The overall product was around 100 pages in total covering 15 major features. UX divided and categorized the features into five major areas of information architecture: Insights, Strategy, Planning, Execution, and Library. Further, there were page types that could be defined and normalized, so as to create templates and make creating new pages much easier. UX established design templates for Modules (areas), Functions, Wizards, Content, Sections, Lists, and System Objects. A visual template was created that would be attractive and engaging and provide a level of comfort for non-technical users. A soothing, earth tone color palette was chosen to accomplish this.
Examples
EMMPower Marketing Platform Homepage
+ Show full size - hold down shift key if new window doesn't appear. Colored with an earth-tone palette, this environment was designed to be collaborative and portal-like. Even before logging in, users are presented with an informative schematic that teaches the marketing process from start to finish. The schematic is clickable, and users can navigate directly to an explanation by clicking on the object of interest.
EMMPower My Home
+ Show full size - hold down shift key if new window doesn't appear. The 'My Home' page is a portal page customized for each user. It specifies what tasks and workflows are needing attention currently. Users can also see draft items of documents that they and others are working on. Furthermore, enhanced data such as industry news and content features help give context and depth to the page. EMMPower My Page
+ Show full size - hold down shift key if new window doesn't appear. The Market Research Plan is an important page in the process of creating an overall marketing campaign. Different project objecs are broken down and visually placed on a GANTT-like chart. Other properties such as budget and owner are listed in a table below the chart.
+ Show full size - hold down shift key if new window doesn't appear. Colored with an earth-tone palette, this environment was designed to be collaborative and portal-like. Even before logging in, users are presented with an informative schematic that teaches the marketing process from start to finish. The schematic is clickable, and users can navigate directly to an explanation by clicking on the object of interest.
EMMPower My Home
+ Show full size - hold down shift key if new window doesn't appear. The 'My Home' page is a portal page customized for each user. It specifies what tasks and workflows are needing attention currently. Users can also see draft items of documents that they and others are working on. Furthermore, enhanced data such as industry news and content features help give context and depth to the page. EMMPower My Page
+ Show full size - hold down shift key if new window doesn't appear. The Market Research Plan is an important page in the process of creating an overall marketing campaign. Different project objecs are broken down and visually placed on a GANTT-like chart. Other properties such as budget and owner are listed in a table below the chart.