Building an internal CMS tool to expand Marketing opportunities.
As an e-commerce company within the direct sales industry, USANA has a devoted distributor base that frequently seeks educational materials on the health and wellness products the company offers. This interest stems from a need to be educated on the products they are selling, as well as a desire for access to effective marketing materials to share with potential customers.
USANA offers a plethora of resources to educate distributors on the product benefits-- mainly in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos and print materials. Few of these resources, however, are accessible via USANA's e-commerce experience.
Because the resources were not in the shop itself, that left the omnichannel user experience feeling disjointed. Rather than helping customers gather the information they needed to make an informed purchase all in one place, they were left to rely on distributors to provide information from various resources, and then navigate through the shop to find the product they were interested in purchasing.
Through user testing, we also found that the generic product information we were providing customers on the product detail pages was not considered substantial enough by many potential customers for them to feel confident in making a purchase. We also wanted a way to help introduce customers to specific product lines and regimens, in a way that was more customizable to customer interests than simply updating content on the product pages.
We needed a way to effectively provide marketing materials within the shop, to help streamline the product education process and help potential customers complete the conversion funnel.
The primary goal of the project was to provide more educational and marketing material within the shop, that could be tailored to the interests and needs of various customer demographics.
Marketing needed a way to provide more personalized, robust educational materials to our customers.
Some notable project constraints:
Upfront Cost
While the ability to create pages without getting the work prioritized in development sprints would be extremely valuable, there was a major expense upfront to make this tool available.
Timeline Limitations
Shifts in priorities and a change of product launch dates led us to needing a quick turnaround on this project.
Organizational Buy-In
The value of this project was not immediately apparent to all of the stakeholders involved. Through ongoing conversations, we were able to help them understand the value of the product, particularly the potential for reduced development costs and enhancement of informational resources within our digital experience.
To begin, I conducted stakeholder interviews with the marketing team, in order to understand their vision and goals for the project. They shared with me the use cases they envisioned for the landing pages, and the types of content they hoped to include.
Through those interviews, we also concluded that a pattern study would be beneficial in identifying common UI components found on landing pages, and analyzing the type of content that is typically associated with them.The pattern study helped us pinpoint common content themes and interface structures, which in turn enabled us to establish a more unified vision of the potential of this tool.
We identified common content themes and used those to inform what UI blocks would be helpful to the team.
While I worked on the customer-facing experience, I also coordinated closely with the lead UX strategist, who worked with our internal Content team that would ultimately be responsible for assembling the landing pages. We wanted to ensure that their feedback and expertise was taken into account, as the primary users of the internal CMS.
We explored several options for how to go about building the pages within the CMS, with varying degrees of flexibility and complexity. Three solutions were considered:
Provi is a B2B online marketplace that empowers restaurants, bars, and other alcohol retailers to order from all their beverage distributors in one place.
ProviPay is a feature available in select markets, to make invoice tracking and payment more streamlined. Rather than keeping track of paper invoices for their beverage orders and issuing checks to their distributors, ProviPay allows retailers to view invoices and submit payments for multiple distributors in one place.
Once the stakeholders had a shared vision of the project direction, I began designing content blocks that would be suitable to address the different content types identified during the research phase. Once I had some blockframes to share, I met with the marketing team to review the options. We ranked the blocks according to how necessary they were for the initial release, as well as their flexibility and usefulness, to help prioritize the order of development.
Once we had the block prioritization decided, we needed to solidify the designs. This included defining the flexible features of each block, as well as content parameters and requirements. This part required a high level of collaboration between team members from marketing, creative, writing, and UX.
In order to ensure that everyone involved in creating the landing pages in the future understood the restrictions and parameters of the page content, I worked with our Marketing partners to create a guide for internal use. It contained pertinent information for creating the pages, such as character limits and image requirements. Below is an example of the photography guides I provided to the Creative team.
These photography guidelines are just one example of the work we did to ensure the page's success well into the future. Alongside Marketing, I also created a service design flow to help define how the various internal teams should work together in creating the Landing Pages, to make sure that the pages we release are web compliant, in terms of color contrast accessibility, and that the images are optimized for the web.
After the initial launch of the first three blocks in the CMS, and the first batch of pages were created, we got back to work refining the designs for the remaining blocks, and creating a couple new ones. Due to competing priorities, the additional blocks have yet to go into development, but are waiting in the backlog for development time to become available.
