This project covers how my team and I embarked on a journey to transform user experience of a prominent customer engagement platform - Maropost. Maropost helps marketers simplify customer engagement to drive brand loyalty and increase conversion.
Background
Maropost has been around for over a decade. More than 600 brands, including Mercedes-Benz, the New York Post, and Scott Sports, rely on Maropost’s category-leading technology. However, many of the users provided poor feedback on the user interface of the platform - it looked "outdated and clunky".
That's when it became evident that we needed to update Maropost user experience. The goal of the project was to ensure that the platform looked more modern and fresh as well employed UX best practices.
My Role
I began as a lead UX designer on this project creating high fidelity designs, establishing UI patterns, and developing page templates.
I created Maropost Design System to ensure consistency and unified user experience.
As time went on I moved into a role of a UX Manager where I led a team of UX designers who continued to create positive changes to the platform.
My team and I closely collaborated with engineering, product management, marketing, and customer success teams in order to deliver seamless user experience.
I coached new UX designers as we made progress to the platform overhaul and established several UX initiatives to elevate design maturity within Maropost.
I created the roadmap for this project and often reported on progress to the senior executive team, ensuring that deadlines and KPIs were met.
Process
UX Audit
I conducted UX audit to identify gaps in user experience. I focused on heuristic evaluation as well as mind mapping and user flows.
What UX audit revealed was very interesting. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel on every single page, we could just change a few things which would significantly improve user experience.
Reskin vs Rebuild
When it comes to UI updates some changes are just skin deep, but some require more detailed approach.
With direction from the UX audit and the evidence obtained through my research efforts, we've decided that some pages of the platform will be simply "reskinned". That means that we will only update UI to reflect our new design system.
Other parts of the platform would be "rebuild" from scratch. For these sections of the platform we would employ design thinking process with research, design, and test phase in order to determine how the user experience should be improved. As a result these sections would go through a significant upgrade with brand new user experience.
Research
What does the data tell us?
I evaluated Maropost platform with user flows in mind and cross-referenced that with user data on what sections of the platform were highly used. Based on my findings I was able to create a priority list which I used to build the roadmap of the new UX roll out.
What do users tell us?
As new concepts and designs were ready I ran remote usability tests with our users and conducted interviews in order to ensure that new designs were working. In a continued effort to gather more customer insights I launched several research initiatives at Maropost that successfully run till today.
Maropost Design System
To ensure consistency in UI and UX a Maropost Design System emerged. I created and documented all new UI patterns and elements that were used in the new UI.
Maropost Design System is still growing and is used by engineering, design, and product management teams today.
Challenges
Too many new things is too much
One of the biggest challenges we faced was time, we worked with very tight deadlines. It was difficult for us to keep on track because we were focusing on so many new things - new tech stack, new UI which meant new UI patterns, new processes between teams, new user experience for our users. All that was a too many balls to juggle at the same time. However, we did it and our customers were happy.
Communication is key
It became evident to me that it's extremely important to clearly communicate with leaders so they understand why things take time to build. Clear and concise communication will ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Outcomes
Happy clients
Our customers were happier. We noticed increase in our NPS (Net Promoter Score) after new UI was released. Fewer tickets were submitted by users to our Customer Success team. We also received positive feedback to Customer Success team directly from our customers who raved about new UI - "Wow, it's so fresh and modern!"
Overall, Maropost platform looks more modern and user experience issues were addressed resulting in a frictionless UX.
New processes and initiatives are here to stay
During this project a new Research Practice and Maropost Design System were established - these two initiatives are far more important than one might think. These are tools that are leveraged by other teams (not just design team!) to this day and empower teams to be highly efficient. To me that was the most transformative part of this project.
