Project Summary
This platform was designed for marketers to build end-to-end campaign assets from landing pages, to EDMs to digital banners. Its social trend analysis matches trends to relevant offers, allowing for simple and effective targeting of consumer segments.
My Role
Interaction Design
Visual Design
The team
Designers
Software Engineers
Project Manager
Timeframe
8 Months (2020)
The Problem
The brand prides itself on creating meaningful connections between consumers, banks and merchants. However, in an ever changing digital landscape, helping banks to engage their customers with relevant marketing was impossible to deliver at scale and speed as banks built campaigns by manually picking merchant offers and fixed creative assets.
The Solution
Aiken built a digital ecosystem with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at its core to allow banks to see social trends in real-time and instantly match them to relevant merchant offers through automatic data language matching.
Harnessing an AI content creator to build end-to-end campaign assets from landing pages, to EDM’s to digital banners. Automatically optimizing content based on performance and building more robust data for future campaigns.
The Approach
Agile
Development of the product was based on Agile methodologies. Sprints were run on a 1 to 2 week timeframe with weekly check-ins with the client on progress. Due to multiple ongoing projects in an agency environment, weekly sprint planning usually involved other projects as well. Stand-ups were conducted on a daily basis. Designs were reviewed by the client during our weekly check-ins before handing them off to the development team.
Design Philosophy
As a feature rich webapp, a large part of solutioning involved presenting a user experience that is functional and non-cluttered. What should be shown to the user to allow them to fully utilise the features on offer? What content only serves to crowd the interface, and is unnecessary?
Each feature was designed with a central goal in mind: To enable the creation of campaign assets that are relevant for current trends and offerings. This meant ensuring a seamless user journey across all modules, and features that suit the main target audience -- marketers.
Main Features
Visualising Trends
To allow marketers to create relevant marketing content, the Outsmart module displays current social trends and recommends content (merchant offers) through automatic data language matching. The feature was designed to give users an insight into current social trends in addition to the trends themselves. As trends are multi-faceted and complex, a related mentions side panel includes media articles to provide the user with additional context for the trend.
2 views were designed for Outsmart: Discover and List. Discover provides an exploratory experience by visualising trends and their popularity via differently sized bubbles. The List view is more structured, showing trends in decreasing order of popularity.
Merchant offers are matched and recommended to users for their chosen trend. Users can add these offers to a cart to begin crafting their campaign or creative assets. We kept the trend and related mentions in view so that its context can drive offer selection.
Digital Asset Creation
The AI creative generator allows the user to build digital assets in moments. It builds copy and image combinations together with pre-designed templates to provide marketers with a solid foundation.
We drew inspiration for the creative generator from website builders like Squarespace and Wordpress. As most marketers are not design trained, the editor allows for limited UI customisability, as opposed to a free form editor. This ensures that each digital asset created provides the best outcome design wise. On the other hand, content and images can be freely replaced to suit the marketers needs.
Campaign Management
To organise digital assets, they are assigned and managed at a campaign level, and marketers can plan and set objectives for these campaigns.
The organisational tools provided aid in the planning and management of digital assets and campaigns. We designed the list, calendar and kanban views to provide a robust planning experience on the platform for users.
Other Features
On-Boarding
I designed an on-boarding flow for users in the beta phase. Prompters were designed for each tab to introduce users to the main features.
Pre-Login
I also designed a pre-login site that will serve as marketing for the webapp in the future. Each page includes a summary of the feature and key visuals that highlight them.
