Overview
Placements.io would like to redesign its calendaring page, which manages the availability, sell-thru, sold-out dates, and other information around sponsorship products for our customers.
Our customers are online publishers (eg, The Seattle Times) who own inventory to serve advertisements. There are several types of products/inventory in advertising. The calendar feature addresses one specific kind of product - Sponsorships. Sponsorship products are innately rare and scarce in availability. Therefore, they are some of the most valuable.
MY Role
Lead Designer | Team: 1 Designer, 1 PM, 3 Devs
Research, Ideation, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping
Research, Ideation, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping
Duration
Jul, 2020 - Sep, 2020
The Problem
Sales and Operations teams need to be able to determine what Sponsorships are available at-a-glance. Conversely, they need to know which days are sold-out quickly. This allows users to communicate to the customer what is available to purchase and vise versa. An analogy would be similar to looking at a specific hotel calendar and viewing what days are available vs. sold-out across different room types.
Our customers do not see our Calendar app to be useful in managing their sponsorship products. They found the feature clunky, doesn't drive actionable insights, and cannot take immediate action.
Redesign Goal: A new calendar that solves real business problem and drives adoption rate.
From our product analytics tool, we can see that the usage of the calendar is really low
User Reseach
1. What we've already known
We started off by reviewing our existing user research database and Intercom support tickets. Not to our surprise, We found a good amount of complains.
calendar view
"While each day is color coordinated based on whether it’s available or sold out, there’s not enough or meaningful summary data."
"There are no toggle or drill-in features. Specifically, I can't add filters by: Product / Geography / Sales Rep / Client Account / Type / Cost Range."
DAILY BREAKDOWN
"Clicking-into each day will provide a listing of products that have been committed, but there’s no summaries to share what’s remaining or provide other actionable info."
"I am unable to book a day if it’s available and must revert to entering the data in the order record."
2. Customer Interviews
From the earlier findings, we formed a general idea about user's desire to visualize what's available and directly booking a product from the calendar. To redesign the experience, we believe it's vital to learn about these sponsorship products' current booking process. So we reached out to our customers and conducted about 10 interviews to cover different business types and media channels.
We found that sponsorship products are usually exclusive takeovers, meaning it can only be sold to
1 client / day or x clients / week
For example: homepage banner ads sold to ABC company for a whole day. So there is a specifc sales limit for these products.
3. Personas
We started to see some patterns across the interviews that there are usually 2 main roles involved in the process. Sales Ops will handle the outreaching and secure an early proposal of a sponsorship product. After a final signature was made, the Campaign Manager will go ahead to make this an actual booking into the system.
Campaign Manager needs to understand what has been booked vs. Sales Ops only cares what inventory is available
4. User Flow
To further synthesize research data, I facilitated a user story mapping exercise with product managers and solutions consultants. We've identified a user flow out of it, and then we voted on the user stories and agreed on a mvp.
HMWs
How might we help the Sales to understand which product is available to sell at a glance in response to a RFP?
How might we simplify the booking experience if the available days are signed off to execute the campaign?
Ideation
1. Find inspirations
I always like to find creative solution by looking at some comparable products & services. For example, book a table and find a doctor. We can see that instead of showing a calendar, these products gave time slots for you to quickly pick and place booking. It serves the Sales Ops persona really well.
2. Explorations
Then I started to put together wireframes based on the personas we know, and provided several different options based on different emphasis on who should be serve as the primary persona.
Option 1: focus on sales and easy booking experience
Option 2: focus on campaign manager to understand inventory and existing booking
Option 3: users still heavily rely on the traditional calendar view
Option 2: focus on campaign manager to understand inventory and existing booking
Option 3: users still heavily rely on the traditional calendar view
Iterate until it solves the problem
1. Ask for feedback
We reviewed the options internally, made some edits, and then sent the mocks to customers again to validate. Most of them still think a traditional calendar view is required since that is how they are used to visualize booking. But they are all very intrigued by the quick dates option, and they thought that was very interesting and easy to take action.
We reviewed the options internally, made some edits, and then sent the mocks to customers again to validate. Most of them still think a traditional calendar view is required since that is how they are used to visualize booking. But they are all very intrigued by the quick dates option, and they thought that was very interesting and easy to take action.
2. Providing two views
Then I brought the findings to CEO and asked if we could actually support two views for different context and persona. He supported the idea and I iterated the mocks to reflect the thoughts.
Then I brought the findings to CEO and asked if we could actually support two views for different context and persona. He supported the idea and I iterated the mocks to reflect the thoughts.
Final Outcome
Two views with percentage to indicate the usage/inventory of the sponsorship products. As well as filtering capabilities on various criteria.
Primary for Campaign Manager
Primary for Sales Ops
Place a hold
by sales ops
by sales ops
Daily Summary
Convert into booking
by campaign manager
by campaign manager
Humble Brag
We completed the design phase first, and worked through some informal usability testing. Did small iterations and feed the results into development. Right now the feature is in beta release, and we've had about 54% of existing customer willing to opt in this feature (previously only 4% adoption rate). Some good feedback so far:
From Walmart:
"Several ideas behind the product are very creative, but still aligned with our business process. We can see this is a well-thought-out feature and we can't wait to use this."
"Several ideas behind the product are very creative, but still aligned with our business process. We can see this is a well-thought-out feature and we can't wait to use this."
From Entercom:
"Sponsorship products is a puzzle and we've been trying to find a way to visualize this. Your solution is so unique and we've never seen something like this in the market."
"Sponsorship products is a puzzle and we've been trying to find a way to visualize this. Your solution is so unique and we've never seen something like this in the market."