Ryan Werth · Product Design and Development

1. User Research, Persona Development, and Journey Maps

   To better understand our users needs, current tools, and painpoints, interviews were conducted with industry contacts and beta testers. Based on our understanding of our users, their roles, organizations, and daily routines, we created personas to represent our different user types. These personas humanize our users and force us to think about our their lives beyond their workday. They are used throughout the UX work in our Journey Maps and other UX deliverables, as well as in writing our user stories.

   • Jeanne Phillips

     Managing Director

     Age

     46

     Work

     Managing Director

     Family

     Married

     Quote

     Repetitive on-boarding tasks for each project slow momentum right out of the gate.

     Jeanne is 60 years old and lives in San Francisco. She has been managing media businesses for 34 years. Most recently she manages large clients – Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic and Safeway, to name a few. PHD is global Omnicom media planning/buying company. Her needs relate to a very high-pressured, retail-oriented business environment. She needs to be on-top of her marketing performance every, single day. Marketing’s impact on sales is what she is judged by daily (company forecasts vs. sales growth). Aside from the tough business environment she faces, the most important thing to Evelyn is corporate culture.

     Her company has been on the cutting edge of creative technology that helps to connect business with great ideation. The platform PHD launched across the entire global network and people (3,000) use everyday is called SOURCE. Using ‘gamification’ as a motivation for responsiveness (a leaderboard that tally’s employees usage), the platform allows people to load briefs, qualitative research, etc., create channel planning, comm strategies, for media plan development. The tool allows people to solicit ideas from members around the world and they get credit for logging onto the system. Their value prop: enabling access to strategic thinking across the entire company for all of the clients – in essence a client gets the thinking of the whole company. It also allows for strategic alignment across teams.

     When it comes to the Connected Brief, she would love to have this tool – half the time she has no idea what the creative team is working on, and they are always the last to know what work is coming down the chute.

     Goals

     • Clear insights into marketing efforts’ successes and shortcomings
     • Streamline redundancies
     • Easily get assistance on (assign) topics/areas that are not her strength
     • Clearly and efficiently communicate the goals and requirements to all parties involved

   • Roger Boucher

     Founder and Owner, Head Creative Director

     Age

     47

     Work

     Founder and Owner, Head Creative Director

     Family

     Married with 2 children (5 and 9)

     Quote

     Briefs are a necessary evil … tho the less evil we can make them, the better.

     Roger has been in the ad business for twenty+ years. He has held many positions within a creative department and has in the past three years successfully grown an agency in the Presidio, SF.

     With kudos and clients like Energizer, DishTV, Uggs, etc. Roger is on the forefront of the new millennium’s Agency.

     Roger’s priorities are doing work that gets talked about. He is a huge risk taker when it comes to creating any work for his clients. His biggest concerns with a platform like the Connected Brief are that he would be very worried that his work is being judged before it was even incubated. He also believes that the Agency has the best relationships when they are face to face with clients (so the idea of a digital platform that could potentially replace that, scares him). He thinks that clients do need to have a better sense of control when it comes to being accountable for work. Right now, they are very old school about briefs – they get it in a word document, sit around a table and chat about it, and then ideate separately.

     Goals

     • Maintain an open discussion
     • Be able to speak to his work
     • Maintain creative freedom - put up the fences
     • Quickly and clearly understand goals and requirements
     • Connect with clients when discussing work (“see” their reactions)
     • Find inspiration throughout the process

   • Luarine Ellis

     CMO

     Age

     53

     Work

     Chief Marketing Officer

     Family

     Married with 3 children (21, 18, and 16)

     Quote

     Creating quality briefs that clearly communicate the goals and requirements of a project are imperative to my success, as well as the success of my campaigns.

     Laurine is 53 years old, and lives in San Francisco CA. She has 3 children (two in College, one in high school). She has been in marketing her entire career, so she has a very comprehensive view of Financial companies (Schwab, Ameritrade, Janus, FinTech). Her priorities are providing strong brand work across the website, advertising and activation. She also enjoys the full depth of the end-to-end customer experience.

     Technical profile

     Laurine is very adept at using digital technologies and she is a quick learner. What she wants out of her platform: ease of use, everything at her fingertips. What she doesn’t want out of her platform: easy access for the CEO. She wants to protect her work in progress before it gets to the broader C-suite. What she wants her platform to do for the C-Suite is to unify everyone and to allow for deeper product thinking. She thinks like a product marketer, but has the scope of an activator across many channels.

     Laurine’s Gallup survey strengths: Achiever, Strategic, Learner, Influence

     Daily Tasks

     • Creative: Talk with agency, give feedback on scripts
     • Brand briefs: outline brief for market plan, review and edit plan, review message matrices
     • Dashboard: Review results on new clients in NC/DK, review digital and offline performance, review lead gen reports, qualified leads
     • C-suite: Updates, presentations to the board, broader strategic vision
     • Culture: create a PPT on observations about marketing team culture, ask a biz leader about corporate culture, update org charts
     • Value prop: work on what the overall company value prop and pillars
     • Daily tasks: scan emails for daily to do’s, prep for meetings
     • Her macro tasks: Create a brand strategy and activations that engage with customers to drive both brand and revenue growth while simultaneously inspires a strong corporate culture and reputation.

     Goals

     • Improve efficiency without sacrificing quality and clarity
     • Communicate requirements and goals as clearly as possible
     • Align expectations and build team consensus
     • Connect objectives with creative strategy

   • 
   • 

2. Product Requirements and Feature Definition

   With a clearer understanding of our users, we create user stories describing the user, the problem, and the goal. These stories are then prioritized based on business need, user need, and interdependency, to form our backlog of work to complete, and help define the product roadmap.

   Establishing a set format for how we talk about features and user needs, establishes a common language for the team to communicate feature definition, and helps distribute the design thinking cross-functionally, ensuring that the “why” is communicated and considered at each step of the process.

   • Real-Time Collaborative Deck Editing

     As an Editor, I would like the ability to collaborate on decks in real-time, so that I can quickly share ideas with team members, and have a tighter iteration cycle

   • Project Empty States

     As a Sky User, I would like descriptive empty states, so that I might better understand product intent on first-use.

   • Invite Team Members

     As a Customer Admin, I would like the ability to invite team members, so that I can build my team in Sky

   • In-App @mention Notifications

     As a Sky User, I would like a subtle notification when I have been mentioned in a comment, so that I am aware of when I may need to respond to a colleague

   • Image Selection Dialog

     As a Sky User, I would like a standardized image selection dialog, so that I can select images from my local filesystem, Dropbox, or Unsplash

3. Opportunities to Innovate

   Through this process – as well as thorough research of existing industry solutions’ conventions, card-sort exercises, and design sessions – we identify new high-impact opportunities to innovate.

   • Real-Time Collaborative Deck Creation

     Real-time in-browser remote collaboration helps to unify the team, and pushes Sky beyond deck creation to become a central hub for teams to rally around developing campaign strategy.

   • Project Boards

     Intentionally ambiguos in intent, Sky’s boards provide a channel for teams to gather inspiration, assets, and brand collateral, to be easily accessed throughout campaign strategy development.

   • Rich Interactive Decks

     The original value prop of Sky – creating rich strategy briefs and idea boards, to unify teams around a central strategy throughout the lifecycle of their campaigns.

4. Design Challenges and Principles

   • Process as a Product

     Selling process and behavior change can be a lofty goal. Conventional industry tools focus on more rigid time-based methods of tracking progress. Sky’s collaborative nature encourages more open free flowing workflow.

   • Trust and Accountability

     A key component to the Sky product was establishing and maintaining trust between the team members using it. With Sky, we wanted users to want accountability, not fear it.

   • Time Well Spent

     With the ease and number of channels technology is available to us today, we wanted to be mindful of users’ work/life balance. Extra consideration was given to ensure our approach to notifications reflected this.

5. Wireframes and Flows

   We create low fidelity wireframes – in collaborative sketches, whiteboarding sessions, or as Sketch files – to communicate structure and demonstrate the steps and navigation required to complete specific tasks. These flows, as well as additional artifacts, such as clickable prototypes, give us the opportunity to validate our assumptions and hypotheses with our test users and industry contacts.

   1. 
   2. 
   3. 
   4. 
   5. 

6. HiFi Mocks & Implementation

   Working with a small team afforded us the opportunity to complete much of the high fidelity UI work in-browser. Implementation often began at the wireframe-level, which provided the additional benefits of a quicker iteration cycle, earlier testing, and getting feedback from current beta testers at lower-cost lofi functional prototypes.

   • 

   • 

   • 

   • 

   •