Christopher Norton

Projects

Aprimo

DAM & Marketing Ops Applications

UX
UI
UXR

Impact Summary

  • Helped the business course-correct by finding features most important to users
  • Retained existing customers while successfully hitting thresholds to deprecate legacy products
  • Cut tech debt and reduced load on support with fewer calls and reduced design and development time by introducing solid reusable information architecture
  • Reduced time and complexity on commonly widely used user actions
  • Reduced cognitive load by providing inline context and enabling direct manipulation
First month at Aprimo

First 3 months - UX Chapter
  • After my first 3 months I took over running the company-wide UX chapter for our team of designers and ran the meeting for leadership in USA, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium
  • Updated teams on future suggestions, design patterns and documentation
  • Recorded and managed issues affecting multiple dev teams
  • Sent out emails to attendees recording decisions made and to do items

Digital Asset Management (DAM) & Marketing Ops Applications

During my time at Aprimo I designed and built prototypes for many features and zero to one projects. To give you a sense of scale and complexity, the full video training alone for DAM and Marketing Ops took close to 6 weeks to complete so this in no way covers the full extent of any single application.

Aprimo Ecosystem
  • Multiple enterprise-level web and mobile applications
  • Legacy versions of similar products
  • Spin-off integration apps like plugins for Adobe Suite and Chrome extensions

Aprimo DAM

Helps companies store, organize, collaborate, and generate a wide range of content items.

Sample CTAs
  • CRUD (Create, read, update and delete) content items
  • Organize, search, and download existing content and branding
  • Integrate content changes within external applications like Adobe to update back to the server
  • Manage usage rights and govern access and permissions
  • Track and audit content status through revision history and duplication detection
  • Dynamically generate new content via CDN functions
  • Leverage existing content libraries to build LLMs and generate new on - brand content

Marketing Ops

Helps companies manage marketing efforts including strategy, campaigns and collaboration with team members across managed timelines.

Sample CTAs
  • Assign team members to tasks
  • Plot out release dates and checkpoints
  • Audit and govern content releases

Design Roadmap

Working in the newspaper industry early on drilled in the importance of the 5 W’s for writing a story but it’s a great foundation for project building too. It’s really difficult to design solutions and discuss trade-offs if you don’t know the context of the why, who, where or when. It’s also hard to know if it actually worked unless you answer the how.

Why
  • Why are we building this?
  • What problems are we trying to solve?
Who, Where, When
  • Who am I building this for?
  • Where and when and will it be used?
What
  • What solution are we building?
  • How do we prioritize solutions?
How
  • How can we measure impact and growth to validate the solution?

Why

Content Item Preview (Legacy Conversion)

Aprimo couldn’t retire their legacy DAM app because users weren’t switching over to the new DAM app.

Project Goals
  • Stop supporting 2 systems!
  • Speed up design decisions and prototyping
  • Allow development teams to work on new competitive features vs supporting decades old flows
  • Reduce load and training for customer support by supporting fewer products
  • Get a threshold number of users off the legacy app.

Who, Where, When

Framing Goals into Solvable Problems

Before I could design a better experience I really needed to know the who, where, when and why users weren’t switching over to a more modern-looking app that supposedly had feature parity. So what gives? What got missed?

Problem 1: Why aren’t users switching over?

Tracing paths using Pendo I found 3 segments still spending time in the legacy application.

System - Form Redirects

Forms were pointing users to legacy pages after submitting.

System - API CONFIG

API calls from custom client software were pulling from legacy areas of the system.

Human - Actual Usage

Most jumps from real users happened around content items which can be accessed by the following users:

  • Marketers
  • Content creators
  • Librarians
  • Admin

Problem 2: What are users doing to the content item

I found which users were hitting the old system but we stalled here for a bit because actions on the content item don’t necessarily go to individual trackable pages and we’d need to push missing tracking hooks to get a better look at what users were actually doing with the content item in the old system vs the new system. We could solve part of the problem now though with a few suggested solutions.

Solution Prioritization

Fixing the bad configurations and enabling hooks would get us closer to the cutoff threshold and were high-impact, low effort. Forms in DAM and Marketing Operations apps could be pointed away from legacy pages and we could have customer service reach out to high-volume system administrators individually to fix their API settings. We could implement both of the system-level solutions while we waited for more user hooks.

Round 1 PrioritizationA. Fix Form RedirectsB. Fix API Configurations
👍A
👍B

How

Validation

We’d know these worked when the old API stopped receiving requests. Visits to legacy pages targeted by forms should also be going down.

Back to Problem 1

With feature tracking hooks installed in Pendo I found that user actions were focused around searching for and downloading DAM content and were bouncing back to the legacy system to browse content catalogs with larger previews.

What

Prototyping

The new system changed the flow to get to a larger preview.

Old system flow:
  1. Search query
  2. Results page
  3. Click on a result to go to the result detail page with large preview
  4. Click back to the results page and on another result to view other large previews

Prototype A - Intermediate preview with full screen

View Figma Prototype

New Flow
  1. Search query
  2. Results page
  3. (Goal) Click on a result to see a preview
  4. Use previous and next buttons or arrow keys to move between results without leaving the large preview

👍 Identify content faster with a larger preview side window

👍 Allow full screen browsing

👍 Creates a selected card state allowing users to mark their place while browsing results

👍 Makes content type more visual with dynamic preview window

👍 More upfront access to metadata

👍 Use arrow keys to quickly move between items and not lose your place

Prototype B - show sibling items fullscreen after clicking on the card

View Figma Prototype

New Flow
  1. Search query
  2. Results page
  3. (Goal) Click on a result to see a preview fullscreen
  4. Use previous and next buttons or arrow keys to move between results without leaving the large preview
  5. Close button to exit fullscreen mode

👍 Identify content faster with a larger preview side window

👍 Use arrow keys to quickly move between items

👎 Loses context of cards appearing before the selection

Solution Prioritization

During demos A was received very well while B was found to be confusing and was jarring for a lot of stakeholders.

Round 2 PrioritizationA. Sibling Preview WindowB. Intermediate Preview
👍A
B
A. Sibling Preview Window

Lowest development effort but confusing for a lot of stakeholders. Perceptual load time was higher as well.

B. Intermediate Preview

Prototype was well received and found intuitive by stakeholders.

How

Validation

  • Over a rolling 90 days, we started seeing users shifting over to the new system.
  • Reduced bounce rate to legacy app
  • Reduced time to find and download content item
  • Feature clicks to expand content items to fullscreen

Impact

User
  • Found content to download faster
  • Arrow keys were picked up intuitively
  • Less switching between old and new applications
Business
  • Helped the business course-correct by finding features most important to users
  • Retained existing customers while successfully hitting thresholds to deprecate legacy products
  • Cut tech debt by half
  • Reduced load on support with fewer calls

ACHIEVED BUSINESS GOALS

  • Speed up design decisions and prototyping
  • Allow development teams to work on new competitive features vs supporting decades old flows
  • Reduce load and training for customer support by supporting fewer products

More on Managing complex design decisions with OOUX

Content items are used throughout all of Aprimo's enterprise level applications so even the smallest change has the potential to break consistency and functionality across the entire platform of apps. Additionally content items are represented across different levels of fidelity inside different features.

Affected Applications
  • DAM
  • Marketing Ops
  • Legacy Apps
  • Browser Plugins
Fidelity Levels of a Content Item
  • Card
  • List/Table Row
  • NEW - Intermediate Preview
  • Full Detail Page

Building consistency across fidelity.

The trick to getting any object to feel similar across various levels of fidelity is to keep the order of properies and provide similar styling callbacks. To compare all the instances of content items I audited the visibility and order of attributes using Object Maps.

Object Maps

Mapping out the information architecture for core objects with OOUX inside AirTable allowed me to track variations of how a content item appears across the platform and between features. It's a methodical way to uncover decades of inconsistency and flag missing expected functionality that is critical to making things feel intuitive. Mapping objects this way also provides a chance to consolidate code and point out opportunities for reusable components.

Preventing Future Chaos

By tracking parents or children of ojects in OOUX I also knew which related objects would also need consideration if any functionality changed. For example what should happen to a user-created content item in the system if the user who created it is removed? Should it get removed as well or just display a missing token where the source link is normally?

Tracking Complex Decisions

Tracking objects in AirTable allowed me tag object properties with release data so I could dynamically filter on what's really necessary. I also attached questions that needed to be sent to various groups or flagged for validation.

Projects