Project Summary: Redesign an application that forecasts and recommends an optimized strategy for marketing investments. This application functions as the primary product for a company whose existing clientele include a number of internationally recognized household brands.
Project Overview
Keen Decision Systems have a proprietary algorithm and methodology for predicting and forecasting optimized marketing investments they have built and integrated into a software solution. From some of their own internal research, stakeholders within Keen found that their customers were having some serious difficulty with the learning curve and usability of their primary product: Mida.
While the output of the application was sound and aligned with the goals of the business, customer onboarding and education was lengthy and often not completely successful. Internal client success managers would frequently need to act as intermediaries when setting up and operating the software solution long-term—an issue that significantly stymied business growth and client retention.
Working as the point of contact for this project, I acted as the product manager and lead designer for an initiative to completely overhaul the usability and functionality of the system.
Discovery
Gather: The Keen team had conducted some marketing studies and knew their customer base fairly well. They provided a significant amount of useful material during discovery, as well as full access to internal teams for stakeholder interviews as well as access to some of their end users.
Process: Through interviews, auditing the existing system, studying the customer’s journey, and numerous discussions with the Keen team, we determined the largest friction points and established the greatest priorities of improvement opportunities.
Special Activity: Aligning Understanding The learning curve of this software was basically a sheer cliff, so we also created several visual mental models of how different systems within the software worked in order to have a unified and comprehensive grasp of the under-the-hood operation of the system.
Explore: Considering the scope of the project, over the course of several weeks, I met on a nearly daily basis with the product lead on the Keen team explore each pain point and feature of the software we identified as an improvement opportunity, brainstormed and explored solutions, existing patterns we could use for quick wins, and sketched out our concepts we wanted to test and validate.
Focus: After exploring different user flows, considering the highest impact of proposed changes, and prioritizing effort based on the outcomes that aligned closest with the goals of the stakeholders, we wrote out and sorted a comprehensive user story map of the project and established an MVP for two phases of development.
Design+Build
Once the MVP was set and stakeholders were on board, we moved to execute on our plan and begin the design + build of the redesign. My work primarily focused on high-fidelity wireframes and direct interaction with the client to iterate and experiment on different solutions for net-new functionality. The UI designer for the project then created a design system and screen mockups based on the layout and intended functionality from the wireframes. Working in this iterative and collaborative way allowed us to break up initiatives into smaller chunks, and validate our designs before moving on.
Launched in Q1 2022, the update—named Mida 2.0—has been met with overwhelmingly positive reception from both the internal team and the client base and preliminary metrics have shown a sharp decrease in customer service tickets, a decrease in onboarding time by an average of 80 – 90% and an increase in customer retention.**
**Numbers generalized due to non-disclosure and confidentiality concerns.