ABOUT

Disruptive tech at it’s finest

Realising the impact of Covid on businesses in the UK, particularly the small independents, the sole traders, the businesses that make up over 80% of the business landscape, BT wanted to help these businesses promote themselves during tough times, allowing them access to powerful AI driven tools to allow them to attract customers. Initially just an idea, Jellyfish tasked me with proving BT’s hypothesis for this program. After designing and testing prototypes, we proved that a platform like the Digital Marketing Hub is extremely useful for small businesses. Every test we did confirmed this.

The new platform will allow businesses easy access to ad channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google Search and Google Display Network (amongst others). Business owners we spoke to during testing use channels like Google, however all of them agree that they are extremely complicated to use effectively. This is where the new BT DMH comes in, it eliminates the complexity of booking campaigns across Google, Facebook and other channels and allows users to set up cross-channel campaigns in a one-stop-shop (impossible currently) – and within minutes! Users can access powerful AI to analyse, adjust and compare their campaigns at the click of a button.

An end-to-end process

Working as lead UX on this important platform for BT, I worked the full end-to-end UX and UI process to deliver an MVP product. Heading up the UX/UI delivery efforts and co-ordinating the UX/UI output from discovery to release, work-shopping with client and product team initially, we extracted requirements and formed a backlog of user stories, prioritised for MVP, helping to rewrite user stories where impacted by technical feasibility during the design phase, creating low and high fidelity clickable prototypes in Figma and then co-ordinating user testing sessions over a number of weeks to help validate those solutions with a mixture of anonymous and internal users.

Initially conceived to be a ‘Covid-19 Challenge’, the MVP product was to be launched in 2020 as a much trimmed down version with aims for the bigger hub to be released as part of the product lifecycle.

One of the major challenges we faced, which we overcame through research, was understanding the reporting metrics of each channel (ie. Demographics, CPC, ROI, Conversions etc). Each channel has different metrics dependent on various factors like campaign type (ie. Reach, Traffic etc), having a global method to display these metrics coherently was key to provide data visualisation that works for the user globally.

Powerful client management services

Apart from powerful front end ad booking services available to advertisers, web chat, chat bots and email monitoring, the back of house services needed to be built entirely from scratch. A task management system needed to be designed and built so that BT admin, sales and service and ad ops would be able to access the platform, communicate with users and be able to manage their profiles and campaigns for them if users held premium accounts.

Solving problems through user testing

Following the design phase, we screened a pool of anonymous users and conducted 80 user tests over the course of a month. Internal BT users were also screened to partake in user tests which involved the client management side of the platform. Clickable prototypes were created for each test and I moderated the tests, alongside my colleague Lorenzo who acted as co-moderator. Capturing feedback, we weighted potential improvements as to whether they would affect the scope – creating new stories for stories which did have an impact. Overall the system tested well and improvements were streamed into the agile design sprints, with finished UI being handed off for development. One of the key pieces of feedback was that users found the system extremely useful as it allows them to book ads cross-channel which they can’t do currently!

Branding and component libraries

Observing BT brand guidelines and component libraries was critical. BT have a brand team who have the final say on what is released. Co-ordinating design efforts with BT to implement their component library, across all responsive breakpoints was key to rolling out components.