Creating a dashboard to help streamline campaign management processes — a case study
A dive into the whole process of creating an internal campaign management dashboard, from research to final product. I worked on this project completely remote, and this was one of the projects in my first year as a UI/UX design field.
Introduction
In today’s world, over 500 million Indians use smartphones and have the ability to easily generate and consume content. Brands have taken notice of this fact and have begun to realize the power of content creators and user-generated content (UGC) in helping to build their brand and sell products.
Aflog is a tech-driven agency focused on helping brands and content creators collaborate with each other to run UGC marketing campaigns.
Challenge
To streamline the complex task flows of our campaign managers so that they can oversee the collaboration of the brands and content creators and help execute a content marketing campaign smoothly.
Role, Constraints
My role was that of a product designer. This project was handled by myself and another designer. My responsibilities included;
- research
- flow conceptualization
- visual design
- prototyping
- developer communication
- product documentation, and a little bit of product planning.
The focus of this project was to have an experience tailored to our campaign managers, and since it was an internal dashboard, there was reduced focus on visual design.
Points to note:
- This project was part of a 3 product platform which included a creator-facing mobile app, a brand/client facing dashboard, and this, an internal admin dashboard.
- The existing creator-facing mobile app was altered to incorporate the required functionalities that were required.
- The brand/client facing dashboard was conceptualized with the whole team, and its ideation and development went hand in hand with the other 2 products.
Process and research
We wanted to take the offline process of campaign management and create an online flow so that the process was streamlined, and all the information was organized and displayed in a way that proved easier for the campaign managers to execute the campaign.
User/Stakeholder Interviews:
We kicked off our research by holding a set of meetings and performing an activity with our users, i.e. our campaign managers.
Activity: We asked them to note down in a paper their roles and responsibilities while conducting any content campaign. They detailed their daily tasks and the campaign process in a chronological order.
Through this activity, we found out that the campaign managers act like a bridge between the brands and the content creators. — their process involved handling all communication with both brands and creators.
Results: We summarized their frustrations into these key points:
- Long turnaround time for each campaign
- Brands expressing frustrations over the standard of content
- Miscommunication between campaign managers and content creators
- Tedious content management
- Missing out important details and feeling lost because multiple tools were being used to run a campaign.
User Journey
Taking the different accounts provided by the campaign managers, we put together the entire flow that the campaign manager goes through from the first to the last step to understand how we could help solve for their pain points.
The user journey can be divided into 3 parts — Conceptualization, Onboarding, and Execution.
Conceptualization:
This part involves the initial communication between a prospective brand client and the campaign managers.
- Brand gives a brief about what kind of campaign they want to run
- Campaign managers analyze the brief; they come up with campaign angles, define aspects like reach, budget, categories of content creators etc., and come up with different campaign angles.
- Brand settles on one campaign angle, and gives their confirmation.
Onboarding:
Once an angle has been decided, the campaign managers decide what kind of creators would be suitable for this campaign and begin the onboarding process for these creators. The brand is involved in this process and decides who all are a part of their campaign.
- Campaign managers scout creators according to the campaign angle
- Brand accepts/rejects content creators
- Finalized creators agree to the campaign/accept the proposal
Execution:
After all the creators for a campaign are selected, the content creation and review process starts. This takes up the most time in the whole campaign process.
- Creators are briefed thoroughly about the whole requirement, and any necessary resources(review products, coupons, vouchers, etc.) are provided.
- Creators create content and send it in.
- A round of internal content screening takes place and any errors are communicated and rectified.
- Content is then sent to brand for approval.
- Any revisions/changes are conveyed to the creator and new content is received. This is again sent to the brand for screening.
- Creators whose content has been accepted are given the go-ahead to post it on their social media.
- Post insights(reach, impressions, interactions, etc.) are collected from all the creators after a stipulated period of time.
- Once all the insights are received for the campaign, the campaign manager compiles a quantitative report of the campaign statistics and sends it to brand.
- Creator payments occur.
Campaign is marked as finished.
Task Analysis
The user journey was then broken down into major essential tasks, so that we could define features that would help streamline their work.
The major tasks were:
- Onboarding content creators.
- Receiving, revising and sending content from creators and to brands.
- Keeping track of social media posting of content by creators.
- General communication with brands and creators.
The Solution
In the MVP, we decided to concentrate on developing a product for the essential tasks. From our task analysis, and from asking the stakeholders, we determined that the communication with brands and creators was the most important activity.
The essential features were:
Creator Chat:
This was a highly requested one, as creator communication is paramount. Since we already had a mobile app that our creator community was familiar with, we decided to incorporate a chat feature to allow our campaign managers and creators to communicate with ease.
The chat feature allowed our campaign managers to welcome, onboard, and convey important information to creators during a campaign.
The core functionalities:
- Receive and revise content/Forward to brand: The creators could send content via chat, and the campaign managers could review it once before sending it to the brand for review/acceptance.
- Button Messages: We defined message templates for actions like asking for content/information, which allowed users to save time on performing frequent actions.
Eg. Button Message for sending content; This message allows the campaign manager to intimate the creator to send content, and
Content Revision:
While analyzing the user journey, we observed that the brands:
- generally revise the first round of content received.
- compared the new revised content with the old content
- had comments about the comparison
Hence, we decided that each creator who is part of the campaign should have a content history/revision thread. This thread is similar to a chat-like conversation about the piece of content.
The brand can revise the content by adding a comment, and the campaign manager can view this comment and reply, and convey any changes to the creators. Every piece of content sent in by a creator is maintained in this thread, so that the campaign managers can see previous pieces.
Creator Database/Community:
This was to make sure that all the relevant information about creators was available to the campaign managers in one place. They could edit and update these details anytime and common information of creators was carried over from campaign to campaign without having to re-enter any information again.
Information Architecture
The dashboard was split into 3 main sections as seen above;
- Brands: A place to see all information of the brands who work with us on campaigns.
- Campaigns: The campaign management space; where all the campaigns can be seen, and where the onboarding, communication, and execution of the campaigns are handled.
- Community: Database of all the creators in our community.
Visual Design Philosophy
Dashboard style design to display essential campaign information, manage creators, chat with them, edit their details, and manage content.
Our main approach to design was to keep it simple but usable. We went with simple, reusable elements to minimize development time while maintaining ease of use.
Due to this being an internal dashboard, I cannot reveal the designs or wireframes of the final product.
Results
After release of the MVP and usage for 6 weeks, we noticed and received the following feedback from the campaign managers:
- Lesser campaign turnaround times,
- Lesser iterations to a content piece from 5 to 2 which can be attributed to organized campaign briefs
- Reduced communication errors (with brands and creators)
- Interns reported feeling less confused with respect to tasks because they could do and view most relevant information from one place.
