News Connect

An internal sales tool reimagined

News Connect is an internal tool used by the ad sales teams at News Corp to help their customers find and target the right audiences in their ad campaigns. I was contracted to work as the Lead UX designer in their core product team, to assist in launching News Connect as a customer facing platform.

research. product team workshops. stakeholder presentations. wireframing and prototyping. ui design. user testing.

Research

Face to face interviews with 6 members of the internal sales staff
Review competitor analysis (created by client)
User testing of multiple, competing products and creation of SWOT analysis
Deep dive sessions on data with the internal experts
Review (and challenge) user stories that had already been created internally

Key Insights

Customers were time poor and wouldn’t use anything overly complicated
Ability to browse News Corp’s audience segments was a big sell
Customers need education around interpreting the data
Customers want to use their own data in their campaigns
More actionable insights were needed

Personas / User Stories

Define the Problem

How might we enable our customers to create more effective ad campaigns using our data?
Browse existing audience segments
Create their own audiences
Upload their own data to learn more about those customers and their behaviour
Create and track advertising campaigns

Goals

Soft launch to a select pool of trusted customers to test the product and gather feedback
Increase number of campaigns booked by the onboarded customers for Q1 2019

Ideation

We sketched on paper and whiteboards and then created low fidelity prototypes for presentation and validation.

Sketches remained public so that they were accessible to all stakeholders, and we held regular forums to make sure the team could provide feedback.

This allowed us to test our ideas quickly, and challenge our understanding against the expectations and needs of the product and technical teams.

A new design system

In parallel to the prototyping we needed to get a head-start on the design work. We developed a flexible component based design system that could be applied and rolled out to screens as easily as possible, and to set the design language for the platform going forward. Doing this early allowed the the development team to start work on UI elements early, and to reduce the time required for wireframing.

User testing

Facilitated user testing with 5 customers and gathered insights
Audience browsing was well recieved but customers still wanted more ideas on how the use that data effectively
Some great customer ideas came up during testing which we may have discovered had we been able to talk to them from the start

Success

Soft launched successfully to a small pool of customers for beta testing
Gathered positive feedback from internal sales staff
Increased volume of campaigns booked in Q1 2019 by five of their soft launch customers