Case study
Improved home page
- Problem identification
- Data visualization
Company
Sidecar
Team
Hackathon team
My role
UX/UI designer
Background
The company & the platform
What is Sidecar?
Sidecar is a B2B digital marketing solution for retailers. Sidecar provides its customers with a blend of technology and retail experts to manage campaigns across multiple e-commerce networks. These networks include Google Shopping, Google Paid Search, Bing Shopping, Bing Paid Search, Amazon Ads, and Facebook Ads.
What is Sidecar Connect?
Sidecar Connect is an interface built for both Sidecar employees and Sidecar customers. For Sidecar employees, Connect is a centralized place to manage technology for customer accounts. For Sidecar customers, Connect is a reporting dashboard to view marketing channel performance.
Hackathon 2021
Every year Sidecar conducts a hackathon event for the innovation team. This event allows engineers and product to form a team where you will pick a problem and try to solve it within 24 hours. The team will then present the result to a panel of judges for the opportunity to win 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place. My team consisted of me and 3 engineers. I was responsible for providing the problem, design, and presentation of the final result. The engineers were responsible for building the page, widgets, and providing Nicholas cage memes for the presentation.
Process
The problem
A growing need for a high-level, cross-channel home page.
Sidecar Connect was originally built when Sidecar’s only product offering was one marketing channel, Google Shopping. When a customer logged into Connect they landed on their Google Shopping reporting home page, which allowed them to dive right into the data. As Sidecar grew from a single channel offering to a multi-channel offering, there became a need for a new home page that provided a high-level view across channels.
In order to provide value on this page, I decided to solve a few known problems and kill two birds with one stone:
- A lack of visibility into channel offerings: There is nowhere in the platform to view which channels have been purchased and which are available for purchase. In the past this has created some confusion for customers.
- Difficulty in identifying customers to up-sell with additional channels: It is a very manually process, and often a shot in the dark, for the customer growth team to identify which customers would be interested in adding on additional channels.
- A need for cross-channel reporting widgets: We received tons of feedback throughout the years that our customers would like an easy way to view performance across all channels managed by Sidecar.
The Approach
Better visibility around channel information and offerings.
The first widget I decided to tackle for the home page aimed to solve the lack of visibility into channel offerings, and the difficulty in identifying customers to up-sell.
I wanted to create a widget that would include all of the following information:
- Channels that have been purchased
- When the channel was purchased
- The status of the channel (onboarding, active, or paused)
- Additional channels available for purchase
- A way to schedule time with the customer growth team to learn about additional channels
After a few iterations and feedback from the engineers on feasibility, I landed on the design below.
This widget allows for all the channel information to be included without taking up a lot of real estate on the page. The user can scroll through the available channels and click the “schedule intro call” link to go directly to Calendly for easy scheduling.
A lightweight version of cross-channel reporting.
There are many different ways to approach cross-channel reporting. Due to the lack of implementation time of this project it what important to focus on the quickest solution that solved the problem. For this widget, I repurposed an existing design and turned it into a cross-channel reporting snapshot.
Here a user can toggle between 11 different metrics and view performance across channels managed by Sidecar. This also provides a up-sell opportunity as the more channels purchased, the more value this widget provides.
The result
A new home page and winning hackathon project.
I’m not sure if it was the Nicholas Cage memes in the presentation or the project itself, but our team came in 1st place for the hackathon event. The engineers built this feature directly into the platform, so it was able to be released shortly after. In its first month this page received 189 views by 172 accounts. Users spent approx. 2 minutes on this page, and have used the multi-channel metric dropdown 75 times.
This version acts as an MVP of a home page. The goal is to monitor usage, continue to iterate on existing widgets, and add more valuable account information over time.
