Scenario Listing

Rethinking how to find and organize Scenarios in MMM app.

team

2 Product managers, 4 front-end and back-end engineers, and me

tools

Sketch, Figma, Principle, InVision, Adobe Illustrator

my role

UX designer and prototyper

time

Mar. 2017 - Jun. 2017

What is MMM?

MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling) is an important technique in Marketing Analytics, It helps know which marketing channels contribute to your business outcomes. Refine campaigns on the fly and use predictive insights to see how changes to your plan will impact results.

Neustar MMM is a collaborative analytics application born based on this technique. It uses interactive and forward-looking custom models to predict outcomes based on marketing and non-marketing business drivers.

Users can use this application to:

  • Review business performance
  • Create Quarterly and Annual marketing plans
  • Answer Ad Hoc questions

what is scenario listing?

Plan and optimize is the core feature for Neustar MMM platform, users can use the Plan & Optimize area to create scenarios and test potential outcomes of marketing decisions or review Neustar MMM's optimization recommendations.

Scenarios are the basic building blocks for plan and optimize, A scenario is basically a set of assumptions about the marketing and non-marketing drivers of your business. Those drivers include marketing spends, cost assumptions, and control variables. Because it contains so much information, it is always a headache to quickly find and organize scenarios in the right way.

Scenario listing page is the primary navigation for the plan & optimize area. As the designer for this project. I am asked to rethink how our users interact with Scenarios in their daily workflow and how to make finding, organizing and creating Scenarios like a breeze.

Who am I designed for?

So the first question, who are the major personas in this story? To answer this question, the design team interviewed both internal TPMs (Technical product mangers) and external client users, we observed how they use our products, understood their day to day workflow and how they interact with people in different roles, then we consolidated all the findings into 3 personas that can best represent the users that use our MMM application.

Let's meet jill, Liz and pete

Jill is the CMO of the company, she wants to maximize corporate profits and efficiency by leveraging their corporate data with the best tools.

She uses MMM because she wants to get a pulse of marketing performance and impact on business, set high level budget and easily test hypotheses, get notified on opportunities and risks, and understand what other business drivers impact business.

Liz is the director of marketing analytics & insights under Jill. She manage spend across multiple channels and need plan budget allocation on a month-to-month basis.

She uses MMM to react to business requests from peers and managers, identify optimization opportunities, understand what's working and what's not working cross channels, understand how to respond to certain circumstances and develop compelling business cases to drive decision making manage team work.

Pete is the manager of marketing insights, he works under Jill and manages only one channel. He needs to provide measurement & insight regarding marketing campaigns, and provides recommendations on how to best optimize marketing investments.

He uses MMM to produce quality analysis in a rapid fashion, manage analysis in one location and mandate from Jill.

Pete's challenge

So, Jill oversees the entire business strategy, Liz manages across channels and plan budget allocation, and Pete responds to ad hoc requests from various stakeholders.

Apparently, Pete is the one who does all the tactical work, and Scenario Listing page will benefit him the most.

His challenges is difficult to manage, understand and remember Scenarios. He doesn't know what are changes to the Scenarios and key insights. It is hard for him to manage, organize Scenarios to quickly develop large scale analysis, and it is also very hard to analyze results and gather insights which are his primary tasks using MMM throughout the day.

What problems are they facing?

After I have a better understanding of the goal and the key persona, then I target all the pain points they have. I used FullStory in addition to capture all the sessions they navigate in the current scenario listing page and observe when and where they face challenges.

Pain point 1:

Users rarely interact with the charts on the right side, which takes up two thirds of the page, it is originally designed to help compare multiple scenarios and view the impact of business changes.

Pain point 2:

Users keep scrolling rather than searching, finding a scenario they want to find generally takes a long time

Pain point 3:

All the metadata for the scenarios is grouped in limited space, in the UI it doesn’t show what each field means and very often the metadata for different scenarios could be very similar, so users need to spend a lot of time to browse through the list.

Pain point 4:

The scenarios is grouped into three sections (my scenarios, current plan & recommendations, shared scenarios), which are limited. Users generally want more flexible way to organize scenarios in their own way. And they need to scroll down if the scenarios they want access is in the sections down in the list.

Pain point 5:

There are too many exit points on this page and in different styles (New scenarios, constraints, view detailed results, edit scenarios), users spend lots of time hovering over those links and buttons and hesitate to click on them because they are not sure what page that will lead to.

What should Scenario look like?

It is easy that we want to fit in all information related to the Scenarios on this page, but then it will be no different than a huge spreadsheet. Showing just sufficient amount of information and providing a good visual hierarchy will be the key for this project.

So how to determine what information I should show for each scenario? One finding I found during the observation is users generally put the most important and distinctive information in the scenario name, so that it can help them quickly find scenarios in the current UI.

So I collected scenario names from all clients to learn what information they care the most in the scenarios and how many scenarios they need to organize.

Last Modified Time
Description
Favorite
Parent Scenario
Calculation Status
Action
Time Period
Scenario Type
Scenario Creator
Scenario Name

Then I try out lots of different layouts based on this list and focus on the visual hierarchy of the scenario. You can see the evolvement of the layouts.

Introducing the NEW scenario listing page

Easy to organize

The new listing page giving you the flexible to organize Scenarios in your own way, you can create folders and assign scenarios to those folders.

clean Visual hierarchy

The new layout for scenario are very easy to consume, information are placed in a good information hierarchy that makes it easy to scan.

Less is more

Secondary information like actions and calculation status are hidden by default, you can reveal those information when hover over the scenarios card and calculation status icons.

No more scroll, just search

The new smart search function, covers all metadata for your scenarios, you can easily search keywords like scenario or folder name, scenario type, creator name etc to find the scenarios you want. Search results are categorized into two fields, folders and scenarios.

Keep it consistent

The style for the scenario listing page is based on the style guide I created for the MMM application to keep the app, elements, and components consistent, organized and available to the team at all times.

Outcome and impact

  • This page became the most frequently used page across the entire MMM app.
  • Clients say this is the most intuitive feature among all feature updates.
  • This page became the navigation hub for the entire application.
  • For year 2019 across all clients (Jan.1, 2019 - Dec 31, 2019):
total number of visitors is 420
total number of Accounts is 180
total number of Page Views reached 31,385
average time Per day Per user spend on this page is 11m 34s

What I've learned

  • It is important to find the primary users I am designing for, especially for 2B products. Most of the time, the users I am selling to may not be the users that use our products daily. I found the primary users that will use Scenario Listing by conducting lots of contextual inquiries and observing how users interact with Scenarios using customers experience tracking tool, Fullstory.
  • I designed a new way to help our users organize and digest information from Scenarios. I minimized the extraneous cognitive load of our users through following ways:
    • Only exposing the information they need to retrieve for making a decision.
    • Limiting the available options on this page.
    • Taking into consideration of visual and content simplicity the whole time.
  • I kept iterating my design by conducting user testing and running design critique sessions. These sessions helped me made design decisions with confidence. In addition, they helped me on track of my design goals in my entire design journey.
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