Asset Organization

A smart folder system that allows users to categorize and access their marketing assets effortlessly

Client

Knak

Year

2022

Role

Lead Product Designer

Managing and finding emails, landing pages, or assets to update or synchronize with their Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) has become a major challenge due to the growing volume and lack of structure. Our solutions enables users to create custom folders tailored to their needs, such as project type, campaign, or other classifications, improving organization and streamlining workflows.

Success Metrics

Within an 6-month timeframe, we aimed to have users create 800 new campaigns within 6 months and a successful migration of 20 customers to the new folder structure.

Research

To guide our efforts, we identified key questions to answer:

What challenges do users face with the current platform?
What tools do users rely on to manage documents and files?
What aspects of the current platform do users like?
What are common workflows for organizing assets?
Which MAPs are most commonly used?
How many campaigns do users manage at once?

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To answer these questions, we employed the following research approaches:

MAP Workflow Analysis

Analyzed campaign organization in popular MAPs to identify best practices and assess what works and doesn't work within these platforms.

Folder Organization Analysis

Conducted interviews with customers to understand their workflows, pain points, and folder organization strategies.

Data Analysis

Reviewed MAP integration data to understand common usage patterns that users are familiar with.

Pain Points

Disorganization

Users struggle to locate older assets due to limited filtering and reliance on recent-access lists in the current experience.

Workflow Disruption

Users often had to rely on workarounds to address the organization issues, which was an external tool like Google Sheets to track all their assets. Jumping between these tools for campaign creation, timelines, and approvals disrupts focus.

Key Insights

Based on the research I conducted, we were able to distill our findings into some key insights

Users often manage multiple assets per campaign

Campaigns typically involve at least five emails or landing pages, making it difficult to find and sync them individually.

Recommendations:

Allow users to group related assets into folders and enable bulk syncing from folder views.

Naming conventions are inconsistent and hard to search

Complex names with project codes, client names, and dates make searching unreliable.‍

Recommendations:

Create a file structure that supports both search functionality and easy navigation
A persistent navigation like file structure that enables users to quickly locate their assets in a variety of ways

Users value consistency in MAP syncing experiences

Familiar workflows from MAPs make synchronization more intuitive.
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Recommendations:

Replicate familiar MAP syncing journeys in the platform to ensure a seamless experience

Disrupted workflows lead to inefficiency

Users lose focus when trying to navigate disorganized systems for simple tasks.
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Recommendations:

Introduce a dashboard with relevant links and to-dos, providing a central hub to streamline their workflows.

Process &
Solution

Based on our insights and recommendations, I started to put some ideas together for the experience.

Ideation

I began by sketching and brainstorming ideas to simplify the asset organization process. Using frameworks like HMW (How Might We) and Impact-Effort, I generated and prioritized concepts for the folder system and dashboard features.

Tools & Design Documentation

Wireframes and user journey maps were created in Miro to explore potential designs and assess their impact. Iterative mid-fidelity wireframes were tested with users to validate usability and feature priorities.

Collaboration with Teams and Stakeholders

This project required collaboration with the lead engineer due to the complexity of restructuring the platform. Regular communication ensured that technical constraints were addressed early, keeping the project on track and aligned with user needs.

Landing Page/Dashboard

The before and after design for the landing page.

Dashboard

The dashboard provides an overview of ongoing activities, such as pending tasks and assets awaiting review. Users can access recently created or edited assets and view shortcuts to streamline their workflows.

Folders

The smart folder system gives users complete control over how they organize their assets. Flexible folder views (thumbnails or lists) adapt to individual preferences, while bulk syncing capabilities make asset management more streamlined.

Intuitive Actions

Features like bulk drag-and-drop reorganization and right-click shortcuts enable quick, intuitive actions. Persistent CTAs still keep the interface user-friendly. This allows the flexibility for different usage patterns.

Results

The beta phase generated positive feedback, validating the demand for folder organization and streamlined workflows. We had 630 folders created in 5 months and 18 customers reorganized content over 6 months.

While we met our folder creation metric, we fell slightly short on customer reorganization due to factors like users being busy creating email campaigns for the holidays and some users not needing to revisit past assets.

Lessons Learned

The project provided valuable insights that contributed to its success and influenced my approach to future work

Working Within Technical Constraints

This project highlighted the importance of close collaboration with engineers to ensure solutions are technically feasible while meeting user needs as it was a large architectural change in the database as well.