Redesigning Terragon's Customer Engagement Platform
10 min read
Product
Role
Product Designer
Responsibilities
Product Design, User Research
Team
Timeframe
Sep 2021 - Oct 2024
The Challenge
Terragon Prime and Marketing Cloud are SaaS platforms designed for African SMEs, enabling businesses to create and launch campaigns for customer acquisition and retention. Serving over 7,000 small businesses across Africa, they help businesses effectively reach and retain customers. Through research and usability testing, we addressed two key challenges on the platforms: a poorly structured navigation causing accessibility challenges and a complex campaign and audience builder flow that led to low task completion rates and high drop offs.
Background
I joined Terragon as a Product Designer back in 2021 and I am part of a team of six designers responsible for various products in Terragon's portfolio. My primary focus is Marketing Cloud. I lead user research and contribute to designing core features of the platform. The team also includes five engineers and two product managers. Additionally, I also provide support for other products as needed.
How We Work
Being a startup, everything we do has a short turnaround time. We have to make quick decisions, convince the stakeholders about our directions, offer support on various products when needed. Whenever there is a feature request or we are to explore new solutions for our customers, everything gets planned in a grooming session along with the product leads, engineers and product managers.
The Product
Terragon Prime and Marketing Cloud help consolidate, enrich, and use customer data to deliver targeted messages and campaigns across channels such as SMS, WhatsApp and Email. It supports audience segmentation, visualization of key attributes, and personalized messaging for effective engagement. Below is a breakdown of the user journey on Marketing Cloud.
Login / Register
Register as a business on Marketing Cloud through a simple onboarding process.
Upload Your Customer Data
Once onboarded, users can upload or connect customer data from various sources.
Create Your Customer Segment
Users can create segments using attribute filters for targeted marketing campaigns.
Engage Your Segment
Engage audiences through multiple channels. Users can select a pre-made segment or create a new one during engagement.
Monitor and Improve Engagements
Monitor campaign performance with insights on audience engagement and optimization.
Research
We conducted extensive user research on Prime post its intital launch. To address the challenges faced by African businesses adopting to a new marketing platform, we analysed feedback from 57 early adopters of Prime who were our primary users. We used Hotjar recordings, online surveys and usability tests to gather the following data:
- User pain points across the platform
- Task success rates in core user journeys - Uploading Data, Creating Segments, Launching Campaigns
Findings
Hotjar recordings and our assessment of core scenarios revealed significant usability issues. To analyse and prioritise all the research data, we categorised the findings from recordings, surveys, and usability studies under common themes or features within the product.
Task completion rates across these scenarios (Uploading Data, Creating Segments, Launching Campaigns) averaged at 55%, 60% and 65% respectively amongst 15 participants in our usability study, indicating a strong need for improvement as this was affecting retention and campaign launch numbers. I then used severity framework to prioritise them, where I assigned a score based on the intensity, impact and criticality of the task. The prioritized tasks were translated into epics which were then broken down into user stories and addressed in sprints. Two of the user challenges are discussed in detail below.
1. Difficulty navigating the platform
The following is a summary of how we addressed two of the higher severity challenges related to navigation nomenclature and the campaign/ audience creation flow.
As soon as you register on Terragon Prime, you land on a dashboard that showcases detailed insight about campaigns run by the user. Below the dashboard menu are the rest of the menu items- TerraCapture, TerraSense, TerraConnect, TerraToolkit, Wallet, Notifications and Account settings. Of the 57 respondents, 34 reported major concerns understanding these nomenclatures.
74% reported difficulty understanding some of the navigation nomenclatures.
34% highlighted concerns about easily discovering and navigating between menu items.
60% task completion rate using navigation in core scenarios.
The navigation aimed to facilitate core campaign management tasks, including data upload, analysis, audience building, and campaign launch. It also includes essential features like account management, wallet, help, and notifications. However, participants found the current menu names confusing, despite their intended brand association.
User feedback on menu nomenclature
"Was difficult to understand the navigation at first. Expected a more friendly UI."
"The site did not go straight unless it has been designed to make it complex for under learned."
"Make the platform more seamless and update the text to be more simple and clearer."
"The menu names are confusing. I would have preferred more straightforward names."
How Might We?
"Simplify the architecture to ensure primary menu items are easily recognizable and accessible, enabling users to switch seamlessly between intended options to improve task completion rates.
Brainstorming Ideas
We used Lightning demos and Card sorting techniques (both open and closed study) to brainstorm potential ideas for navigation. We explored some of the existing navigation across similar and competing products through a lightning demo session. Using inspiration from the lightning demo, we came up with a new set of pre defined categories and corresponding tasks for the closed card sorting study. We were also able to trim down on the sub menu items and make it easier for users to access them easily. A usability study was conducted on the new design to validate the architecture.
Once the categories were voted for, I used UXMetrics for the card sorting exercise. I created task cards to represent actions users can perform on the side nav and created pre-defined category names from the research for the tasks. Participants would either create new category name for the tasks or sort the tasks into the predefined categories.
Results
9 participants completed the study, who were early adopters of the platform. In addition to sorting cards into pre-defined categories, 8 unique groups were also created by them.
Except for the reporting/ insight menu, the rest of the newly created categories matched the pre-defined categories that we had coined earlier exploring other platforms. This made it rather easier for us to apply the new nomenclature and reduce the number of sub menu items.
Revised Design
Results from the information architecture study gave us an insight into how users perceive side nav titles and what their expectations were. We were able to define new titles that improved accessibility and conveyed the primary product goals better. Below is the redesigned navigation architecture.
Usability Testing
16 participants were introduced to the new architecture. The study was conducted remotely using Lookback↗ and the participants were asked to perform a pre-defined scenario that involved performing tasks by switching between different items in the side nav menu. Individual task completion rates were recorded for the scenarios.
Of the 16 participants, 2 participants shared feedback about difficulty accessing account settings as they tried to update their profiles. 14 participants shared they were happy with the new navigation. We recorded an increased task completion rate of 80% on the new architecture compared to 60% in the old architecture.
Design Iteration
As more features got added to our product, the navigation architecture needed to be revisited. Further assessment of user feedback suggested that accessibility to certain features were still a challenge for users. To address this, we conducted yet another card sorting exercise to further improve the architecture. Details of which are presented briefly below.
A revised layout that we integrated into Terragon Marketing Cloud is shown below. As you can see, addition of features like engagements, insights, journey builder and many more into the platform made us revisit the architecture once again. A thorough sorting exercise was again the need of the hour to adapt our user's mental models to the new setup.
2. Difficulty launching campaigns and creating audience segments
With regards to the audience builder and the campaign creation flows, about 15 experienced users expressed their displeasure on the 4 step process to launch a campaign or create an audience segment. They felt the steps were tedious and some of our session recordings also supported this insight as we saw frequent drop-offs.
A key feedback was the difficulty users faced while selecting audience attributes for segments or campaigns. They had to frequently navigate back and forth to review previous selections, which was essential to track audience changes based on selected attributes. Another notable challenge was the presentation of the audience as a percentage value. Users preferred to have this presented as the actual number of audiencs as it helped them evaluate the campaign pricing better.
Cumbersome Process
The 4-step process for launching campaigns or creating audience segments is time-consuming.
Not Optimized for Experts
The design does not cater to advanced users, slowing their workflow.
No Real-time Feedback
Users lack a summary view to validate changes without navigating away.
Unclear Audience Metrics
Audience size is shown as a percentage, but users prefer actual numbers for better pricing evaluation.
Brainstorming and Evaluation
We explored some of the existing platforms such as Google ads, Meta ads manager, Hootsuite, Mailchimp etc. to gather inspiration on how we could solve for the challenges identified. We tried to look for patterns that would help us solve for the user challenges. We tried to achieve the following before creating wireframes.
Streamline Campaign Flow
Simplify the 4-step process for launching campaigns or creating audience segments.
Optimize for Power Users
Enhance efficiency for experienced users by speeding up their workflow.
Improve Feedback Visibility
Provide a summary view to validate changes without leaving the current step.
Enhance Audience Metrics
Explore better ways to display audience size for accurate pricing evaluation.
We put together all the explorations on a FigJam file and scored them based on the challenges identified. We also assessed each idea on some of the heuristics that were appropriate for improving the overall journey. Below is a scoring exercise we did for the campaign creation flow inspirations.
Wireframing and Feedback
Based on the scoring and the problems identified, we prototyped wireframes addressing the pain points. This was setup for an internal review with the product and engineering team as well as shared with study participants for feedback.
Prototype feedback
A summary of selected attributes on their respective titles and the wizard steps were missing from the wireframes which was added later on. Overall, our engineers and product managers were happy with the updated flow. We also received positive feedback from some of the participants we tested the wireframes with.
Design Iteration
An updated design was introduced for participants, we were able to reduce the audience builder flow to just a single page from the initial 4 pages which also reduced the campaign creation process to 3 steps from the initial 4 steps. The redesign accommodated user requests for showcasing attribute selections as preview.
Streamlined Campaign Flow
The 4-step process was reduced to 3 steps for launching campaigns or creating audience segments.
Optimized for Power Users
The user flow was optimized to reduce the number of steps for experienced users.
Improved Feedback Visibility
Selected items were displayed as a preview to help users track their selections and edit at later stages.
Enhanced Audience Metrics
Pricing summary was updated to show actual audience numbers instead of percentage.
The selected audience preview was also redesigned to show the audience numbers instead of percent audience. We also restructured the preview layout to help users have more clarity on campaign pricing in accordance with total selected audience numbers.
We used a stacked layout for the audience builder to support the audience selection and preview of attributes in a single page. Users were now able to view all the selections in a single page and modify selections according to their budget and audience numbers. This would save multiple back and forths while buidling the audience.
The audience summary card was revised to prioritize the actual number of selected audience members instead of the percentage of potential reach. This crucial change empowers users to make informed budgeting decisions and accurately estimate campaign costs.
Usability Testing Results
The updated designs went through another review to measure task success rates. The same participants were asked to complete the campaign creation flow on the new prototype. Out of the 15 participants, 13 completed the campaign creation flow successfully on the test prototype, compared to 10 participants in the earlier designs. 2 participants had trouble understanding the prototype linkage and hence could not complete the flow successfully. The redesigned flow improved the task-completion rate for the campaign creation process by 20%.
Impact
The product had upto 70% reduction in bounce rates on Terragon Marketing Cloud while using the updated campaign and audience creation flows. More interaction on the engagement feature were also clearly visible with increased successful campaign execution and segment creation numbers which also generated significant revenue on the platform. More users were able to create audience segments and launch campaigns with ease.
Launch and Media releases
Terragon Prime went live back in February 2022. It was one of those marketing products that garnered praise for its simplicity and ease of use. A revamped Terragon Marketing Cloud was launched in mid 2023. This largely accommodated fixes to any usability issues identified in the earlier version.
Learnings
Research consumes a lot of time and resources and sometimes you need to make tradeoffs on how much time your team needs to spend on primary research. It’s always wise not to reinvent the wheel. When you have a hunch that a simple exercise would help, as a designer, you should go ahead and do it. The redesign of the audience builder layout was based on the team’s strong instincts and we were less worried as long as it served the purpose.
Using UXMetrics was a quick and easy way to map a user’s understanding of actions to menu titles. In a different scenario, one may have to conduct this exercise offline, requiring multiple resources and materials to run a detailed Information architecture study.
While working for a business, It’s possible that you may have to strictly work with stakeholder and business requirements but it also becomes your duty to point out and convince what is better and what is not when it comes to design decisions.
Takeaways
Over the past 3 years, I have grown as a designer, leader and as an individual. I have helped implement mini design research techniques to speed up our design process, helped improve usability across Marketing cloud, conducted workshops and mentored junior designers in the team.
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