Connecting Experience

Bring scattered campaigns together

😊😧 The Bittersweet situation

There are a lot of live campaigns going on, but — there is no easy way to build connections between campaigns

In marketing world, people are moving through their customer lifecycle through different campaigns, if it is not clear how the movement happened or should have happened, it will restrict marketers from supporting more complex use cases and thus open up more use cases.

👞 Research: define user jobs

While it’s tempting to start thinking about a comprehensive mission control panel across all experience types (which we know is the desired outcome we ultimately want), with limited resources, we try to find the smallest coherent solution that goes in our desired direction while enabling us to ship and learn early.

From the conversation with Engagement team (who are most familiar with customer use cases roadmap), we learned that users from multiple accounts are already utilizing complicated workarounds to get the “connecting” job done, more specifically:

• Primary job: People who joined Exit Audience of a Journey (e.g. joined “first time purchaser” audience from the “on-boarding” journey) should enter another Journey to continue their customer lifecycle

• Secondary job: People who completed a Journey should enter another Journey to continue their customer lifecycle

Thus, we decided to focus on “Connecting Journey” first.

🎨 Ideation: different level of sophistication

We broke the idea of connecting Journeys down into a spectrum of options of varying levels of sophistication, it turned out there were 2 key decisions we need to make:

• How to define the connection: Journey-based, Node-based, or both

• Where to define the connection: Push, Pull or both

Evaluating standard

• How effective is it against the jobs to be done that we set out?

• How easy would it be for our clients to set up?

• What’s the level of change necessary to our existing product?

• What’s the effort to build this?

🙌 Make a Decision

Decision 1: Journey-based better supports both jobs

Journey-based is to look at everyone in the Journey regardless which node they are on, then apply some conditions to it to define the people who should enter another Journey.

Node-based is to look at the end node of each branch and make enter different Journeys if necessary.

While Node-based seems more intuitive for users when thinking of “connecting”, this model cannot support the primary user job (since exit audience should be evaluated against all nodes, not just the end node).

Decision 2: Pull model better matches users’ mental model

If users are going to make the connection, where should they do the “connection configuration”? Inside the source Journey, or the Journey that’s been connected to?

We originally thought it would be ideal to have both touch points, but from the review sessions with our customers, we realized that for the majority of time, they prefer to do the configuration from the “Pull data” perspective since:

• It’s more familiar since that’s how everything works in other parts of the platform

• The complete marketing strategy is usually implemented one Journey at a time. When source journey has been setup, following Journey may not be ready yet.

💻 Design Walkthrough

Step 1: Drag to start

Step 2: add additional conditions

Prompts: Be aware of the impact of change

👀 A peak to the solution

Play with the setup flow here in Figma 👉 here

💡Learnings

“Scope down to primary job stories”

Resist the temptation to do the ambitious full-scope project and start from something small first.

“Be aware of the impact of user actions in different states”

Try to map out all the user actions in different touch points and evaluate how the action will impact the workflow. This early consideration will help a lot when it comes to identifying edge cases and informing engineering scoping.