Consumer Center Builder
UX Design | Enterprise UX | Desktop Design
My design provides a flexible and simple builder solution for enterprise clients to customize and combine user centers for privacy management and marketing recommendations.
Time Frame
3 Week Design Sprint in April, 2020
My role
User Research, Design and Iteration, Prototyping
Project Background and Overview
There is an increasing need for businesses to integrate privacy with marketing needs.
OneTrust is looking to expand the business focus from user and corporate privacy to marketing management.
What we have currently: We already have a platform for business users to build and manage cookies banners and consent management, but nothing specifically for marketing purposes. we are losing customers because OneTrust lacks a unified solution for managing user activities in privacy as well as in marketing.
What we aim to implement: We aim to integrates privacy into clients’ existing marketing and IT technologies to manage the entire privacy and marketing lifecycle, from collection through withdrawal. The new product will demonstrate accountability across various collection points, enable users to manage preferences, and centrally maintain a consent audit trail to help demonstrate accountability with regulations.
Below are some of the goals and heuristics we set for the new product.
Design Goal #1
Design Consistency
The user center is built upon the current platform of OneTrust, and the design elements need to remain consistent across platform.
Design Goal #2
Customizable Branding
The user center will be a tool for any brands to build with their own user portals, with their own branding assets.
design Goal #3
Multi Purpose
The user center will serve both the marketing teams and the privacy teams within corporations to retain customer loyalty.
User and Topic Research
Initial Research Plan
At the start of the project, I wanted to get more involved with clients and see their current practice of managing privacy and customer relationship, and the reasons behind merging these two services together. Before diving into the user research, there were a few questions we want to address with the user and market research. This will also be the objectives for the user and topic research.
For enterprise users: what are the use cases for their privacy and customer relationship management needs?
– Which are those requirements we can achieve as quick wins?
– Which are longer term goals?
Study Method: Client meetings and client calls
For customers and end users: How do they comprehend the relationship between privacy and managing their email notifications?
– Why do end users visit user centers?
– What are the frequencies for each type of purposes?
Study Method: User Interviews and Surveys
For market: How is the market doing right now?
– Are there similar products or services on the market?
– What are our SWOT in the market?
– What are some of the benchmarks we can borrow and use to guide the designs?
Study Method: Competitive analysis
And before diving into the user research, I have made a few assumptions and design challenges based on our current interaction with clients and their usage of our platform.
Initial Design Challenge:
To business users: How can we help our business clients overcome these barriers between privacy management and customer relationship management (CRM) and create an effective platform?
To end users: How can we promote user sign up rates and seamlessly navigate between privacy management and account information management?
Research findings – client feedback
Clients want to use unified user centers to merge all user traffic for marketing purposes.
Who were our interviewees? In order to gather feedback and business use cases from our enterprise clients, I had calls and onsite visits with four clients, all were B2C clients with a large user base and most of them were fortune 500 companies.
How are they currently using our platforms? Some of them are currently using our OneTrust platforms to manage privacy requests and separate tools to manage customer relations. The other clients have not purchased OneTrust products because our current limitations in CRM. Below are some of the use cases clients have for both customer relationship management and privacy management.
What are their current workaround? Almost all interviewed clients currently have a separate CRM system, and some have privacy portals to collect user privacy consent from cookies and consents. A few have a dedicated portal to collect privacy complaints. However, all expressed that their current solutions are fragmented and they need different platforms for different purposes.
What are their desired use cases for the unified center? Based on our discussions, below are the most frequently mentioned use cases for the new product.
Research findings – Market competitive analysis
Though a number of privacy management providers are dipping their toes into the marketing industry, however there are limitations in combining privacy with marketing and providing related branding and content services.
We sampled the following four privacy management systems, all of them were mentioned most frequently during our interviews with the enterprise clients . Among these four systems, they share the similarities of self service, centralization and customized branding assets in their systems.
In short, each of the platforms have its own pros and cons. In short, they can be summarized as:
Pros: Most powerful platform among all researched platforms.
On the customer side: The system empowers customers to manage their own experiences through customizable, self-service preference centers.
On the enterprise side: The system ensures that consent and preferences are consistently enforced through centralized, simple, and secure data governance and orchestration.
Cons: no centralized branding center, no branding asset management
Pros: The system allows consumers to access and track all brands that collect their PII from a single place. This also ensures the safety of the sensitive PII.
Cons: The preference and the marketing management experience are fragmented. No BAM available. Frondend UI configuration limited.
Pros: Users have the freedom to manage all marketing and communication channels in one place.
Cons: Still a very basic platforms. Not much customization in general.
Where does our product stand – SWOT analysis
With interviews and competitive analysis, I synthesized the findings into SWOT for our product market position and opportunities we can seize.
From the client calls and market research, I have turned this information into a competitive analysis. And with the help of my product manager, we organized the features we want to include in our first version of the user center.
Research findings – User surveys
Most end users would only subscribe to a user center if they want to track purchases or a long time loyal followers to brands.
Who were our survey respondents? We sent out surveys to our enterprise clients, and they helped us distribute the surveys to their end users. Out of the 31 responses we collected for the 8 questions.
How are they currently using the user centers in general? According to the survey responses, users in general are not very active on the user center. They mostly sign in to the center when they need to check out order status, and hate it the most when the user center is confusing in navigation, or is impossible to unsubscribe or updating information.
Painpoints
Synthesized from both the client interviews and user surveys, I found a few common points and these can be the competitive edges our preference center competes in the market.
Pain Point #1: For enterprises: user traffic is diluted and management is not unified.
Enterprise marketers communicate with consumers through various channels and may use different platforms for each.
In one of the examples of our clients, a company uses MailChimp for email marketing, SAP CRM for direct mail marketing, SurveyMonkey for surveying preferences, and a home-grown system for customer account management. The company is also using OneTrust DSAR for collecting and communicating with consumers submitting privacy related requests. The company may also use OneTrust Consent Management for collecting and tracking consent and privacy preferences.
Pain Point #2: For end users and enterprise users: It is a fragmented experience to manage privacy and other marketing preferences.
Especially for the enterprise users, they are losing customer retention and loyalty because of it.
Many marketing platforms already have their own preference center, which a consumer can use to manage their preferences for that specific platform.
Enterprise marketers, however, want to centralize preference management for their consumers so that the consumer can view, update, and manage their interactions with the business from one location and thereby create a better user experience with the brand.
Pain Point #3: It is vital to include enterprise branding assets into the user centers
User center is one of the most important touchpoint between enterprise users and their end users. A number of our enterprise users declined or stopped buying our preference center product because the current center can only support partial branding customization.
However currently OneTrust does not support the flexibility.
Refined Design Challenge:
To business users: How can we help our business clients unify the traffic of users and manage all user relationship in one place, and turning privacy management part of the CRM process?
To end users: How can we simplify and unify user journey of managing their communication profiles, marketing notifications and privacy requests?
Step Two: Ideation and Design
Design Overviews
After the market research and user interviews, I came up with a set of design principles to always come back to and reflect on while designing. It’s a good way for me to closely connect the user research with the designs. I also used these principles as the heuristic evaluations for my final prototype.
Goal #1
Simple
We do not need to re-invent the wheels. Users can expect to have the same interactions and design patterns throughout the builder.
Goal #2
Versatile
Every client and brand has its own branding and content guidelines. Users can freely create and are not limited by the content or layout restraints.
Card sorting
With so many elements and variations of states in the unified preference center, we used the card sorting method to understand the elements we will need to have in the preference center as well as the branding elements we need to include in the branding center.
User flowchart
Then I sketched out the expected flow for a group of enterprise users to build a consumer center. This involves a number of personas included in the user research. For any scenario, we expect to have at least three personas to be involved in setting up a preference center.
Final Design
The last step in the process is to turn all these findings into designs. The MVP included the key features and requirements: 1. Add a new preference center and add content block; 2. Translate preference center into other languages; 3. Add custom branding to preference center.
Consumer experience for the user center
Consumers can use the center to manage their preferences, submit privacy requests and view relevant privacy policies.
Add and Edit Content Block
Admins can use the center builder to add and edit any categories of content.
Translate Preference Center
Admins can assign translations to translators and monitor translation progresses.
Branding for User Center
Admins can upload and manage branding assets in a molecule design system library.
Set up Identity Verification
Admins can manage third party verification and single sign on methods in the ID verification library system.
Design Next Step
This is an ongoing project and I am actively iterating based on user feedback. A preliminary SUS survey has indicated a drastic increase in scores and a few existing customers have expressed interests in buying and piloting the product. However we still have a few issues to solve from our initial client demo and interactions. Below are some of the most outstanding issues.
Dashboard Analytics – We need to gather more information on the dashboard designs
Many of our clients provided the feedback that the dashboards are necessary tools for them to track KPI and follow up with customers. In addition to a default dashboard, they also need customized dashboards. How can we improve the usability of the default dashboard and also provide solutions to create and share dashboard views?
Customer loyalty – how do we utilize the tool to improve it?
Now we position our tool not just data security and privacy management tool, but also customer relationship management platforms, how can we utilize the portal better to retain customer loyalty and push for customized information?
We are looking to refine and update designs based on these issues in the upcoming quarter of 2020. Please stay tuned for more iterations.