Brand
Meredith
My Role
Product Designer
Year
2016
Meredith’s portfolio of brands is massive and is largely supported by advertisers in digital, print, and news media.
Advertisers were managing their accounts on a brand by brand basis and were in desperate need to have one place where they could go to manage all their advertising spend and view measured performance.
I was tasked with coming up with a dashboard that would scale, was helpful, and intuitive for the user. I was not granted access to Meredith’s vendors. However, I did interviews Meredith sales reps, who would act as the concierge for our vendors. The insight was valuable. The pain points were heard daily by the reps, so they were great fill-ins.
The dashboard started with a bootstrap grid that would be based on a card style layout. The simplicity allowed for a quick launch where I could focus on developing the individual card patterns based on their function. Some were simple, like a quick display of data or information. Others were a bit more complex like managing the billing and purchase of products.
There were a number of vendor types to account for. Some are smaller, where one person takes care of all the billing. Some were enterprise, where a chain of stores each had to be able to manage a budget and performance that a corporation would fund.
There was a lead management tool, a customer interaction tool, and a website profile page building tool that were all designed out, starting with wires and finishing with polish. The overall experience was intuitive, but I created simple tutorials complete with exported animations to guide the user if they wanted it.
To make the handoff easier on the dev team, I built out a light, 20 page atomic style guide to reference. As a team, we reviewed all aspects of the design prior to, during and at launch. We also took advantage of the newly launched (at the time) Invision Inspect feature, which saved a lot of time.
Feedback was great. The time saved greatly reduced the calls to our sales reps so that they could focus on sales rather than support. We were able to target specific upsells to clients with comparable performance numbers between them and other vendors in their industry based on the packages purchased. We could also launch promotions and campaigns that were personalized and reaching the right vendor at the right time.
