Meltwater monitors media intelligence and engagement across all forms of media.
August 2014 - July 2015
I was brought me on to head up UXD to establish a design-informed culture across the company.
Meltwater is a major media and social monitoring and outreach platform. It has 55 offices around the world, and collects billions of data from news and social media sources every month. The total dataset is upwards of 1.2 trillion articles and posts so far. One of the few situations where “big data” is an applicable description. Each post and article is analyzed (much in near real-time) to help individuals and organizations track media impact, monitor for key events (positive or negative), and coordinate a cohesive response across platforms by facilitating outreach and engagement.
Results
Provided executive leadership to revitalize the corporate culture with an holistic design philosophy.
Established design leadership across the product team. The core design team grew from 3 to 9 designers and researchers to support more than 150 people in the engineering org.
Defined 2-4 years of detailed product initiatives and direction. This directly supported the IPO completed shortly after my departure.
Lead several innovative projects to visualize data for C-level executive suites with Meltwater.
Improved customer success support to transition a majority of existing customers to the new platform within 12 months of the initial release.
Designed several initiatives to establish consistent design best-practices throughout the product life-cycle.
Integrated design and research deeply within the product definition and development phases to reduce wasted effort and improve outcomes.
Launched the new platform and complete rebranding of the company.
Conclusions
The impact of my efforts can still be seen in the platform and company today. I created a product vision several years into the future, established rigorous design processes for the company at large, and built up a great design team to carry things forward during my tenure.
Changing the Corporate DNA
Experiences and objectives during my tenure at Meltwater.
Responsibilities
When I arrived at Meltwater it was clear UXD hadn’t been a priority of the company. This wasn’t due to any ant-design culture, but simply a lack of design experience and ethos. It was like bringing water to travelers lost in a desert. The entire team enthusiastically supported rigorous product design and definition processes. This basically boiled down to three core areas…
Show leadership why good design is worth the investment. This, of course, is where I spent the majority of my time. I specifically wanted to get the executive team, engineering, and sales/marketing on board. Preferably in that order. To that end, we quickly tackled problems with disproportionate, short-term benefits to demonstrate the value of integrated design to all key stakeholders. This then allowed longer-term design initiatives to gain support.
Build the design influence. We quickly grew from 3 designers (including myself) to 9 designers in addition to product managers and researchers. With an appropriately staffed design team we were able to support ongoing projects while exploring nascent products with the executive team.
Establish design patterns and processes. I introduced several design tools to help, including substantial improvements in usage data collection. Most importantly, I defined what constitutes a good or bad design with objective metrics and subjective methods the entire team could consistently apply anywhere. With clear definitions in place, the entire approach could be much more rigorous, and leverage new data and tools effectively. Importantly, these processes prevented most product and engineering technical debt, which was a substantial problem when I first arrived at Meltwater.
Demonstrating the value of design
We started by helping engineering remove huge technical debt by consolidating common UX patterns into components reused across the platform. This is a common problem with products built organically, but was particularly bad at Meltwater due to the widget focus. There are many interesting solutions under the hood, but at the UI level Meltwater is a dashboard designer.
For example, we identified at least 27 different implementations of dropdown or dropdown-like UI components shortly after I took over the team. During this process we reduced it to one implementation with a few specific UX options (e.g., multi-select was an option we could toggle). This made the code much more maintainable, and allowed for more efficient use of existing resources.
In fact, this was so successful, we effectively increased the capacity of the team by 10-20% in short order. These initial steps were key in accomplishing both rebranding and more material improvements throughout the platform. It also helped much of the executive team understand how valuable design can be for the company.
But, we weren’t going to stop with these short-term wins. Rather, the design team had already developed a long-range vision of how all standardized components could be organized using an atomic design model. We made huge strides quickly, but expected the entire project to last through 2017. Ultimately, the leveraged standardization and organization translated into lasting improved UX and engineering maintainability.
Example dashboard leveraging the new UI/UX paradigms and simplified branding elements.
Rebranding for the next generation
In just a couple short months, the team completely overhauled the brand of the company. This was a large task unto itself, but occurred in parallel with releasing the new code-base and growing the team. To say the least, it was challenging. However, the new brand and product were released without any major problems or setbacks. In fact, we were able to release ahead of schedule and slightly below the planned budget.
There were many small touches added throughout the product to help emphasize this corporate image. This helped tie previously disparate components together as one cohesive product. Imbued the product with the somewhat playful tone of the new brand. Even provided unique branding opportunities in subtle ways. For example, the indeterminate loading spinner was replaced with the blinking eye of the Meltwater logo.
The new Meltwater brand in action.
Releasing the next generation: Outside Insight
The next generation platform, introducing the concept of Outside Insight, had been in development for nearly two years before I arrived. It was on the precipice of release, but had substantial, known UX problems. At the team was ill-equipped to solve these issues, but did recognize their importance. This is a big part of why they brought me on in the first place.
So, in the months leading up to this release, we substantially improved dozens of the most painful UX points, making common tasks easier. We focused on new user and casual user journeys. Certainly the improvements would also support the minority power-user persona as well, but we wanted to get the most value for the largest audience possible for the initial release.
Here are a few examples we improved leading up to the public release.
Simplify key workflows. There are many workflows within Meltwater to define the insight you’re looking for, and actions to take with that insight. Unfortunately, these were built over a couple years, and often by different engineering, product management, and design teams. For example, there were three distinct ways to add facets to a saved search for insights in different contexts. We consolidated these to a common UI/UX paradigm. This reduced engineering maintenance costs, and substantially reduced cognitive load on customers using search in different contexts.
Out-of-the-box insight. The flexibility of an enterprise product such as Meltwater can be quite intimidating for most people. It’s a massive blank-page problem, in which new customers often don’t even know what questions can be asked, no less which questions they should be asking. The Meltwater sales team helped customers get started, but with varying degrees of success and skill. We identified a handful of visualizations useful in most circumstances to build a couple standard starter dashboards. These were specifically designed to help new customers gather initial insights while educating them on deeper questions they could start asking. This improved the reliability of customer conversion, and reduced the time spent by sales on each individual account.
Improved information hierarchy. The product had grown somewhat organically for the previous couple years. This lead to many really innovative features becoming buried in a confused navigation system. As I frequently told my team, the best visualizations in the world don’t do any good if nobody can find or use them in practice. The new hierarchy substantially reduced support call burden, improved customer satisfaction, and further accelerated sales conversions (especially people upgrading from the legacy products).
All together, these improvements nearly doubled the number of saved searches and dashboards per customer. Important KPIs used to compare the legacy and next generation products. The general stickiness of the platform also improved. It was still too early to tell, but we expected the improved stickiness to lead to lower turn-over as well.
In short, the next generation platform ushered Meltwater’s Outside Insight into the 21st-centry of enterprise software solutions. This facilitated a successful IPO just a few couple years later.
Introduction to Outside Insight.