The challenge:

Zaius is a customer data platform (CDP) that takes all that lovely information floating around about you and “stitches” it together to create a super customer profile that marketers can use to better market to you. I was brought on board to partner up with the Product Director to improve the usability of this unique data. While having this data was great for marketers, the challenge was designing ways to convey a lot of data without being overwhelming and confusing. There was a fine line between showing enough useful data and not showing enough that users didn’t know what to do with it.

Research phase:

The Customer Profile section of Zaius was going through a lot of changes as it started off as a simple grid of customer information (or “identifiers”) such as address, telephone numbers, customer IDs, etc., but was completely overwhelming to look at. We needed to find a way to allow marketers to access these identifiers in a more user-friendly way and also manage these identifiers based on customer consent and reachability.

The first thing I needed to do was understand what identifiers were, what each identifier did, and learn more about CCPA and GDPR. It was then I was able to start formulating what our user (the marketer) was trying to accomplish and why.

What were they trying to accomplish?
Marketers were trying to reach customers through the most valid channels of communication in order to send personalized marketing messages.

Why:
Marketers wanted to make money but needed to adhere to new privacy laws affected by GDPR and CCPA. In order to do so, they needed a way to view every customer’s identifiers and manage each identifier’s consent (are they opted in or opted out to receive marketing communications?) and reachability (is their method of contact still viable?).

Diagnosis:

Many of our clients, the marketers, were young and somewhat inexperienced with marketing because the reality is, most people who end up working for small businesses in marketing probably didn’t study marketing and ended up in marketing because they were willing to learn and had a knack for communication and analysis. Knowing this, I needed something that avoided a lot of jargon, avoided information overload (which was hard when there is so much data to work with), simplified, and utilized current design paradigms even though we were introducing new features.

Wireframing phase:

Wireframing took a while, I’ll admit. There is always the challenge of trying to be innovative while also sticking to the current design system and design paradigms established before you got there. I found myself coming up with ideas and later being told that “Zaius doesn’t have that design paradigm” or it was out of scope. I went through several iterations due to the Product Director having issues with the design, the user having issues after we tested them, and engineering saying it would take too long or there was no existing component they could use (and building from scratch was out of scope).

Some issues raised during iteration:

• We needed to present GDPR and CCPA opted in and opted out choices with every single identifier
• We needed to also present opted in and opted out choices for other marketing communications that did not fall under GDPR and CCPA without confusing the heck out of users
• How could we display Push Tokens (a string of code that could be the size of a small paragraph) without being visually overwhelming?
• How could we scale to show all identifiers which can range from a small handful to dozens?

Although it took some time to finish wireframing, which I did in Sketch to save time, I did learn a lot about identifiers!

Design and Prototype phase:

Once the wireframes were locked down, designing was a breeze since I was creating my wireframes in Sketch which were full color, almost pixel-perfect, and using all the correct symbols and components from the Zaius component library. In other words, it was too high-fidelity for wireframes, but I was trying to save time!!