ion interactive
Case STudy
Quick Start Cloud
View available templatesEnabling the customers of ion interactive's core product to launch marketing initatives quickly through a vast template library based in customer use cases.
Background
The ion interactive platform relies on over 100 templates to create data-driven experiences without tech-savvy resources or developer code. I joined to drive the strategy and creation of these templates, prioritizing based on how we could make impact to drive company revenue faster by addressing more use cases.
Goal
Creating headache-free templates for web experiences, such as calculators or assessments, for non-coders was an emergent trend. The templates needed to to be user-friendly to both the end-user and the customer utilizing the platform. This would differentiate us in the market from other web builders
Timeline
The Quick Start Cloud has been a growing, iterative process that I worked on from 2014 to 2019. Over that time, I brought on more team members to work on building the template library and focus on strategies for increasing net new sales by addressing new feature needs with top RFPs.
CHALLENGES
In 2014, interactive content was beginning to come into the marketing technology world. At the time, Chief MarTec author Scott Brinker had coined the term 'marketing apps' as an emerging category, which the ion interactive software fit into. To inspire and enable our customers to launch these impactful content pieces, the Quick Start Cloud was born. Upon entering ion interactive in March of 2014, I partnered with the CEO, creative director, and VP of engineering to lay out the strategy to design and develop templates that fit the growing needs of our users.
RESEARCH
Starting out, our market was new, exciting, and relatively unknown. Through research conducted through Demand Metric, we discovered early needs for our marketing customers to be focused around assessments, infographics, and white papers.
This research led to the first phase: create a prolific library of these content types for marketers. As the process evolved, we learned from the customers through product metrics and interviews more needs to help us refine where we needed to enhance the product and library more.
At this point, I developed a process to review ideas, metrics, and market research and prioritize template creation and necessary engineering support on a month to month basis.
This research led to the first phase: create a prolific library of these content types for marketers. As the process evolved, we learned from the customers through product metrics and interviews more needs to help us refine where we needed to enhance the product and library more.
At this point, I developed a process to review ideas, metrics, and market research and prioritize template creation and necessary engineering support on a month to month basis.
IDEATION AND DESIGN PROCESS
Once the template needs were defined, each month priorities were set and myself and my team met to determine the requirements for each new template. Utilizing a project requirements document, we would establish necessary user experience level, purpose, expected content (eg: a yearly report for an infographic), conversion point, value, and necessary interactive elements. From these guidelines, a quick sketch would be created to establish quick agreement on the design and layout before jumping into creating a low fidelity prototype in the ion interactive platform.The ion interactive platform itself allowed us to create designs and prototypes quickly - sometimes in an hour or two - before diving into the full fledged design and development of a final template. This gave us the unique ability to iterate and test a template quickly.
CREATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Creating templates that aim to be a positive user experience both for the platform customer and the platform customer's end-user is an intricate challenge. The need for a beautiful, dynamic, and modern user experience is often hindered by the constraints of a platform-driven environment, the required effort of the platform's development team to make updates, and the platform user's ability with this type of software. Our team developed a detailed list of requirements for each template, ensuring that when a client chose a template, they could easily switch to their brand's CSS and have minimal updating to do for design.
TEMPLATE Examples
Outcomes
Over the five years I was there, the increase in marketing applications created (defined by experiences with trackable interactions on page, logic, or multi-page experiences) went from 12% in the first 6 months to 90% by 2019. In addition, creating custom templates for large-impact customers brought in roughly 25% of revenue between 2018-2019, a process I pioneered to add direct revenue goals to the creation of templates.
More portfolio work
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