Team
Product Manager, Product Designer, 3 developers, QA tester
My Role
Product Designer
Platform
Desktop
Employer
Xeno
Duration
Jan 2020 - Aug 2020
Project Status
Live
About Xeno
Xeno is a B2B SaaS Product Company specializing in omnichannel personalized campaigns. I joined the team as a Product Designer with a mission to enhance the product experience and foster greater user engagement.
PROJECT BRIEF
Xeno had an existing product, but clients struggled with sending out personalised campaigns, which was Xeno's core offering. To address this, we embarked on a redesign, the goal was to make it easier for users to send out truly personalised campaigns. As the sole Product Designer at the time, I spearheaded this transformative project from inception to execution.
CHALLENGE
How Might We enable brands to execute omnichannel personalized marketing campaigns within minutes?
Research,
Identifying Problems and Setting Goals
To understand the perspective of the users towards the current product and evaluate its effectiveness.
To observe how users use the current product to run personalized campaigns.
To learn how customers use analytics to run better future campaigns.
To understand how marketing managers plan and execute their marketing strategy.
DISCOVERY INTERVIEWS
To grasp the reasons for mistrust and gain insight from the customer's perspective, we conducted interviews with seven users who had direct experience with Xeno's product.
Additionally, I engaged with founders and team leads to understand their expectations for the product and the challenges they faced.
IDENTIFIED PAIN POINTS
Multiple campaigns (not single) have to be created to create a personalised campaign
Creating personalised campaign takes long long time, is very tedious and monotonous task
Reports are often inaccurate in a cluttered format.
SUCCESS CRITERIA
We quickly defined success criteria amongst ourselves (me and the founder working with me) to define when the release would be considered successful.
Success criterias:
35% of the total campaigns should be personalised campaigns.
100% of the campaigns should go out from the newly designed product
200% should be reduction in time to create personalised campaigns
60% of the reports should be exported from the product
Outcomes
CHALLENGE 1
How Might We make the personalisation easier, efficient and effective?
I discovered that users wanted the ability to not only personalize content using variables but also to make slight modifications tailored to different personas, such as varying purchase habits or shopping patterns, all while tracking them within a single campaign. The older product lacked this flexibility.
To address this issue, I implemented a two-step solution:
Combining personas and variations: This enhancement enabled users to create campaigns using customer personas with multiple variations.
Deeper personalization within a single campaign: With these variations, customers could swiftly create campaigns with enhanced personalization, saving valuable time compared to the laborious process of creating multiple campaigns.
This streamlined approach empowered users to achieve deeper personalization and efficiency within their marketing efforts
Impact
For the first time, users could create a personalized campaign within minutes. What used to require several hours for execution now takes just a few minutes. With the new flow, users experienced an approximate 8x increase in speed. Previously, a similar campaign would take up to about 120 minutes to execute, whereas with the new flow, it only takes around 15 minutes.
Iteration
Three months post-release, only about 8% of campaigns were personalized. Users were still creating multiple campaigns for personalization. To understand this, I spoke with users directly.
Insight
Users expressed a desire to combine variations in most campaigns for unified analytics. At times, they also sought to analyze the results of two variations separately for A/B testing purposes.
Collate Variations feature allowed users to combine 2 or more variations, send their communcations, analyse them together. This further increased the usage of the Product many folds.
CHALLENGE 2
How Might we make the audience selection more effective?
While talking to internal team I realised that Xeno’s business model is such that they earn money on affiliated marketing, which means more their users earn through Xeno’s marketing tool, the more Xeno earns. So the question was how can we imrove marketing campaign perform better. One of the answer was by reaching to the right audience. Can we drive it through the product?
I had a quick chat with Nishant Munjal! A Senior Engineer in the team at the time. He said, he can figure something and in came a feature which would suggest the best audience for a campaign using data with some basic inputs.
So Nishant and dev team built an Algorithm which would select the best audience for the users to run the campaign on and I implemented designs for it.
Impact
A campaign that would normally have the hit-rate of ~35% now had a hit rate as high as ~75% when using the algorithm to select the audience.
CHALLENGE 3
How Might we make the reporting easier to export and reports easily accessible?
User also complained about inconsistent reports. In the older products, customers would run campaigns, ask for report from account managers, account managers would ask the data analytics team to fetch the reports. This was not scalable because:
With more clients bigger data analytics would be required.
The whole process sometimes took days. Because data analytics team was always full of requests.
Clients would often be frustrated with account managers because of the long waiting time.
Initially we had planned on making a dashboard in the product and then give out the exported csv reports within the product however we ended up changing the approach because clients wanted the csv reports, they would often show these files or insights to their managers or on some occasions CMOs.
Impact
Within 3 months of release there were over 1000 campaign reports exported across all customers. The ask for custom campaign reports had reduced to ~30%
Creating Personalised Campaign Flow
Personalization emerged as the primary pain point consistently highlighted by each user. They expressed frustration with the inability to personalize campaigns at a deep level. The only available option was to create multiple campaigns, which consumed significant time and effort, rendering the process highly inefficient and monotonous.
OVERALL IMPACT
WHAT USERS HAD TO SAY
Animesh
"Personalised Campaign which would earlier take over 1.5 hours and 24 separate campaigns created all under 6 minutes. I was quite surprised in a good way when I used the new feature. This is just too easy for me now"
Kavya
"The platform's flow is so simple, it feels like everything is flowing in the same direction. The reports are very accessible now. I don't really have to use my mental space into wondering when will I get the reports"
Fahad
"I thoroughly enjoyed creating campaigns with the new tool. Very easy to use. I'm confident with the product now. Everything looks very structured and reliable"
Learnings
Innovation does not happen in a eureka moment. We must constantly talk to users, keep checking our biases. When solving for reports I was so biased that we need dashboards. In fact I had started working on dashboard already, suddenly when talking to customer I realised that they need reports more than dashboards. In fact dashboard was not even required.
Always talk to users before jumping into solutioning.