CBU Marketing Applications
A suite of web apps to support achieving marketing objectives
My role
UX designer, UI designer, project manager, product manager, front-end developer
My responsibilities
Product design, project/product management, front-end development
My methods
UX design, UI design, project management, and front-end development
California Baptist University (CBU) is one of Southern California's fastest growing universities. With an enrollment of over 10,000 students, and over 1,000 employees, CBU's Marketing unit is tasked with providing professional marketing services across print, digital, and advertising mediums.
CBU Marketing Applications is an internal suite of web apps that helps California Baptist University's marketing team manage various projects and interface with internal systems. I served as both project, design, and team lead on an internally facing suite of web applications to support marketing functions.
Context
High demand, low efficiencies
CBU's Marketing unit provides a number of services to university departments ranging from managing websites to designing print collateral. In order to scale the demand for their services from internal departments, they needed a central system that could unite various functions and systems to expedite their work. At the time, a number of legacy systems were used, but they were very rigid, not user friendly, required individual accounts, and required contracting with outside vendors whenever maintenance or improvements were needed.
Process
Uniting different functions in a single place
For the design portion of this project, I followed a four-phased approach: research, discovert, design, and development.
Research
I conducted user research via group and individual user interviews that enabled me to identify the unique needs of these users. Some of the questions I asked included:
- How do you use the current systems?
- How do you complete work?
- What are the biggest pain points for you with the current systems?
- What is an ideal feature you’d like to see implemented?
Discovery
What emerged from this research was that we needed an umbrella system of apps with various features (e.g. project management, marketing content collection, etc.) that function as “apps”. Initial discovery for this project focused on the two different types of users: a) marketing unit staff who would use the system everyday and b) university staff who would use the system to submit project requests and marketing content.
Design
I sketched some preliminary wireframes to identify necessary functionality and establish the foundation. Then, I moved onto designing the UI, choosing to be conservative both in use of color to match the CBU brand, and visual hierarchy as it was important to not clutter the interface for two reasons: 1) the end user needed to be able to use the system with ease; and 2) the marketing staff needed to be able to review and process requests quickly. I also worked with our visual designers to design icons for the various apps.
Development
In my role as front-end developer, I used the Bootstrap framework as a base to help build the initial prototype and eventual MVP. This was a way to get up and running quickly and allow me to create the appropriate placeholders for the backend developer to tie everything together. Once my front-end development was done, I worked with the backend developer to complete overall development and launch the product while also establishing a scaffolding to support future design iterations and apps.
Outcomes
Reducing the task-switching
While largely a tool for marketing unit staff to manage their daily work, the Marketing Applications system proved popular with client departments (even spawning a clone of the project request app for the Printing department). One of the best outcomes with this project was how quickly we could make iterations thanks to the way the system was engineered to support multiple apps; all we had to do was spin up a test app containing the iteration in question, set permissions, and test.
Uniting disparate systems into a single interface, accessible from any device, and the feedback received was that this truly changed how they worked and reduced the amount of friction created by having to keep multiple windows open, manage different logins, and deal with the cognitive load of multiple systems each with different user experiences.
Reflection
Creating a custom solution together yields positive results
I was in a unique position to see the results of all the hard work the team and I did on this product throughout my time at CBU. The initial launch signaled a significant shift in the way CBU Marketing operated as uniting separate systems into one platform enabled greater efficiencies in both planning, execution, and management of marketing tasks.