Audience 2.0

Beyond Definition

Audience page — where marketers decide who to reach out for their campaigns, is the most used yet oldest page on AIQ platform. All clients love it but it will not be good enough as their organization structure and business use cases get more and more complex. One of my most challenging projects here with AIQ is to constantly push small yet high impact improvements on Audience page without breaking their current workflow.

Audience Organization

At the very beginning, all Audiences live on a flat table in alphabetical order. However, our clients have good amount of Audiences ranging from 400 to 2500, making an alphabetically-ordered table no longer the right option.

Challenges and Key considerations

Design for Security, QA and Ownership

Security is one of the key considerations for Enterprise clients when utilizing a tool dealing with data. Having accurate and comprehensive metadata is essential for their data governance and QA process. In the meantime, those metadata could also be used for better filtering and searching experience.

Make it Scalable

Providing a quick solution for current clients could ease the pain temporarily. However, it might lead to the wrong direction in a long run. Designing a solution that could scale to a larger set of potential use cases while being simple enough for current users to adopt is challenging.

Make it Relevant

ActionIQ is a team environment. While it is great to put all team files in one place, it is also easy to get lost in files that are not necessarily relevant to you. Finding a solution to locate files that are more relevant to individuals without disrupting team conventions (the way Audiences are organized, naming convention etc.) is important.

Audience Insights

Understand Audience composition

It is easy to create an Audience in AIQ if marketers know exactly they want to send “Female members who has purchased Kate Spade products in past 60 days” a 20% off coupon. However, marketing priorities changes all the time. Having a better understanding of Audience composition will help marketers iterate quicker and make more educated decisions on personalized content.

One-time Insight VS long-term Monitoring

Sometimes insights are only useful when marketers are creating and tweaking Audience definitions. However, there are also times when they want to monitor the information everyday to see how it’s trending or changing. Enabling users to track certain type of insights on a separate dashboard is something we put on roadmap.

Connect the dots

Fix low-hanging fruits

Add links to objects (composition audience & variable)

Improve based on usage

We use Pendo to track basic usage of the Platform. One interesting trend we found is that one of the most popular behavior flow of our users is “View Audience Detail Page (under Define tab)→ Switch to Activation tab → Export Now”. We put a short cut directly under “Define tab” to guide users to the suggested action and avoid the unnecessary switch.

Provide best next step

We always got feedback from customers asking "so what's next?". We improved the workflow and connected different parts of the product together.

Reflections

Make sure the most important improvements ship first. Show value to customers (and the rest of the company) early so that you will have more say to prioritize other improvements in the future.

Quick/small improvements do not necessarily means less value.

Loop in the product and engineering early when building design roadmap, their input could help a lot when prioritizing the projects and get the right expectation on timeline.