The Role of Design in Giving Birth To a New Exciting Product
In the last year, I have been busy designing one of Namogoo’s coolest products called Intent-Based Promotions: a solution that offers individualized promotions to eCommerce site visitors based on real-time buying intent. Machine learning algorithms offer the right promotions needed to convert each shopper.
This is the first blog in the series, in which I will share the creation process of the product, and in particular, how I approach this huge challenge.
Designing any product can feel overwhelming, but breaking it down to the essential components makes such a project easier to approach. Intent-Based Promotions contains the Campaign Creation area, where the user sets up their campaigns, the dashboard where they can track campaign status and results, and the design of the promotions displayed on the site. This blog will focus on building the Campaign Creation area — essentially the workspace of the user.
Research
I started with gathering information about the competitors in order to define what exists today in the market and also understand which features should be part of the core experience. I analyzed the platforms, understood what is essential or what was missing. As you can see in the table below, part of the research compares each competitor’s ability.
Then, I spoke with potential users to better understand how they use similar tools, their needs, which features are most important to them, and what are their main pain points.
What Did I Find Out?
- The flow of creating a campaign should be very quick, intuitive, simple, and easy. The user should be able to create a campaign in a few minutes.
- A first impression is a matter of seconds — and if the user does not have a positive impression, they will abandon the product and look elsewhere.
- The flow should be divided into steps. This will help us create a user-friendly product that doesn’t overwhelm our users with options — each step will be focused on one main task.
- No matter how many prepared templates we will offer, we need the ability to customize each template to the user’s needs
First Sketches
My next step was to start summarizing all the information that I found and received from other talented people in other departments like marketing, sales and product.
I had a lot of questions, like how should I split the campaign creation flow into steps? What should be the order of these steps? How many decisions should the user need to make in each step? Should they first see our amazing promotions? Or should they start off by defining their campaign goal or incentive type?
Low Fidelity Wireframes
I organized my thoughts, and started creating wireframes with features that were decided as part of the basic structure. In this step, I could test the flow and overall user experience and iterate through many design options quickly. It helped me define our expectations and remind me of what I wanted to present on each screen. Wireframes are the first time I put elements on the screen and create a product that starts to feel real.
First Designs
When I completed the wireframes, I started working on the visual design. At the beginning of this step, I tried many options, playing with the grid and colors to find the right direction that best fits the vision. I got feedback and this helped me progress and define better the visual language of the product…
Finalizing Design
This is almost the end of the process, just before development. The design was completed! The Campaign Creation area is divided into 6 steps in which the user chooses:
- The goal of their campaign
- The campaign type
- The main color which will be seen in the next step
- A template from the templates page
- Define settings like start/end date of the campaign, discount range and more
- Tweaking and customizing the promotions in the studio, and when done publish!
Here are some of the main screens:
Here’s a short video of the product after it was developed:
Look & Feel
In order to maximize the user experience and appeal of the product, I aimed to create an aesthetic and intuitive interface. This process helped me to better define the product and the visual elements which can distinguish our brand from other platforms.
Final Design Element:
- A combination of images and graphics
- Light purple as a background-color
- Rounded edges and circles for a friendlier look
- Fresh and vibrant colors for fun and simplicity
In Short
The process has taught me so much about how to build a product that will best serve our customers. I feel lucky that I had this opportunity to be part of the birth of a product. I learned that product design never truly ends and should be carefully revisited at all times.
In this blog I focused on the process of building the product, but as you can see in the image below showing a zoom out of my working file, the product contains so many different features — and it’s only growing day after day.
Today, I’m working on a bunch of exciting new features and improvements that are taking the product to the next level. Stay tuned!
