Listen to your users

The team of field marketing managers were required to submit their marketing requests via an internal intake app that was making their lives harder.
‍I led the redesign of the marketing request intake web app, leading to a ticket submission time reduced to under 20min, the dropout rate being reduced to zero and the increase of the number of requests, increasing productivity.

One app, 99 problems

The field marketing managers relied on a request intake form app to submit requests to the marketing team. The app was a constant source of anxiety, frustration and wasted time through back and forth communications via MS Teams chats and endless email threads.

Company growth: new employees, old processes

The original form served its purpose when the company had 500+ employees but, after an exponential growth (2000+) in 2 years, it became clear it needed to be analyzed and redesigned.

We ran usability tests with power users which had a duration of 30/45 minutes. Our objective was to understand how they behaved and felt while requesting a booth design, collateral (brochures, directional signs), and social media coverage through the marketing request form.
We concluded that:

Users felt discouraged to fill out the form due to its length and lack of a progress status.
Users often felt confused because of the form's poor hierarchy, layout and taxonomy.
Users felt frustrated whenever an error occurred and their work would disappear since there wasn't a save option.

Confusing layout

The two-column layout and flow did not favour a good user experience. For example, the “Project Timelines” card occupied too much space and was intrusive to the flow by pushing the actual form fields under the fold. The “Project Type” card would often be ignored and forgotten after filling out the rest of the form.

Excessive vertical length

In the existing design, users needed to scroll past the fold to start filling out the form, leading some users to skip the form altogether and contact the marketing team directly, undermining its purpose.

Redundancy and similar naming conventions leading to confusion

Some fields seemed redundant like "File/Folder Link", "Final Approved Content" and "File(s) Upload". All these could be consolidated into one field.
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Some fields didn't offer much context such as "Vertical". As a new user, it was hard to know what to input in such field. "Availability Date" fields were often object of confusion and/or left blank.

Analyzing the journey

The user interviews allowed us to understand our user's journey and identify opportunities to improve it.

On Stage 1 - when the user decided to send a marketing request - they would already feel confused as it wasn't clear how to get to the form. There were educational and visibility issues.
As a possible solution, the access to the portal could be given in the onboarding to the company and the marketing department needed to promote the portal in a more effective way.
On Stage 2 - when the user was filling out the form - the user would be disappointed, overwhelmed and lost with the length and amount of fields they faced.
There was an opportunity to improve the flow, reduce and/or chunk the form and improve the taxonomy to help clarifying and guiding the user throughout their journey.
On Stage 3 - when the user would submit the request - the user would often be angry, in a mixture of not understanding what to input in some of the many fields, or would feel discouraged with the length of it, preferring to reach out directly to the marketing department instead of filling out a request. One of the many complaints was that, if an error were to occur, all the progress would be lost and the user would have to start over again.
This could be easily solved with an auto-save feature to ensure, at least, that some of the progress would be stored and could be recovered.

Everything above the fold

We designed 3 wireframes for consideration and, after meeting with the stakeholders, this was the selected wireframe to test and finesse.
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The landing page had all the information above the fold in a clear and structured way, there was a progress bar to help users keep track of their progress and the tiles were grouped by team inside the marketing department.

Results & Learnings

With the re-designed form:

the users were able to submit requests under 20min
the dropout rate was reduced to zero
the number of requests increased and the number of interactions between the requestors and the marketing department were significantly reduced, increasing the productivity

This was a great opportunity to educate the marketing department on validating design choices with users.
It was also a chance for me to further develop my project management skills as I was wearing many hats by being a senior graphic designer with team lead functions and also a UX/UI Specialist. This project was taken as a proactive task and ended up being crucial for the marketing initiatives.