Cision -
Impact for Earned Media
Feature Enhancement / Quick Wins
Design Brief
Cision’s mission is to build better media relationships, craft more creative, data-driven stories, and demonstrate the value of user efforts. Their flagship product is the Cision Communications Cloud, or C3 for short.
My team worked to improve the user experience within Earned Media to ensure users understand complex audience, attribution and web conversion data. I was tasked with utilizing a new UI Library to create an updated and organized flow of the large volume of data metrics.
ROLE: UX & UI Designer
TOOLS: Pen and paper, Sketch, InVision, Jira, Zeplin, Zoom
DELIVERABLES: Hi-Fi Mockups, Interactive Prototype, Zeplin Styleguide
Legacy Styling
C3 had been working to develop the “Impact for Earned Media” product for months before I was brought in to clean it up.
Their MVP design entailed a dashboard with search buckets set up based on the users needs (for example, competitor search), and those dashboard tiles displayed basic data metrics.
When a user clicked a card, they could view more in-depth charts. However they weren’t displayed in a logical order, and they took up so much space that users had to scroll a long time to see all the information available.
Before - The C3 legacy Impact dashboard design.
Example of charts page where users would have to scroll to see all data.
Changes
As if the information we were dealing with wasn’t complex enough - Cision acquired their biggest competitor (Trendkite) in early 2019 and the roadmap for the year was thrown out the window. Our new goal was to blend the two software systems, and FAST. Everything was put on hold, the UX Team whipped up a new UI Library and each designer was assigned an area to reproduce. I was assigned the Impact area, but with a few quick win enhancements:
Data Consolidation
Present metrics in more bite-size chunks, versus long scrolling views
Organization
Reframe the layout to better show the relationships between information
Plan Ahead
Prepare components for audience personas to be enabled in version 2.0
Input Needed
Due to the fast pace of the re-design project and the red tape with setting up user interviews, my next best resource was the Cision Customer Experience team. They were on the front lines every day talking with our end users and teaching them the specifics of our software.
I spoke to 4 different reps and the feedback was clear: the Earned Media interface needed to be simple and avoid overwhelming data presentations.
“Keep it simple. Keep it clean.”
- Customer Experience Team
Pen & Paper
Keeping business needs and Customer Experience feedback in mind, I started sketching as well as a few lo-fi iterations before I felt I had enough detail to get a flow into InVision for Product and Dev to review.
My initial layout was designed to have the information at the top of the detail page feed into the next piece you would see - leading to a more natural flow of data for the user to digest.
Initial sketches to capture ideas for smaller components.
Playing with the layout flow.
Initial mocks
Continue to Iterate
My goal for Version 2.0 iterations was to continue to hone in on clarity and simplicity; by being a bit creative with designs it helped the product team eliminate inefficient layouts and bring forward new ideas to try.
Reusing familiar patterns and keeping the UI as the centerpiece instead of an afterthought ensured the user would have better control & understanding of their data.
[Update: Aug 2019] Version 2.0 was still in development and planned for release in Q4. The next feature going through refinement and early development is “Audience Amplification”, which allows users to target and amplify an audience of their design for a brief campaign and receive a report of the results.
