Sitecore Personalization

Personalization and machine learning for one of the largest marketing tech enterprise tools on the market.

UX Design, 2019

Role
Senior UX designer
Year

2019

Skills
  • Product Strategy
  • User Research
  • User Experience
About

Sitecore is an end-to-end marketing platform, allowing its customers to create and publish websites, ads, and email campaigns. While on the UX team I lead the strategy and design for the personalization and machine learning capabilities in the product.

DISCOVERY

Workflows, roles, and personas

Large marketing teams have complex audiences and deadlines. Understanding the various factors that went into planning campaigns, defining goals for segments, and creating a workflow system for internal teams to sign off on content, meant a continuous discovery process. We reached out to several customers, both using Sitecore and competitors, to understand the many stages of this process. Using surveys we were also able to cluster our users into proto-personas to have a better understanding of their role in the team and common tasks.

Creating an audience

The first step to creating a personalization campaign is to define the audience one would like to target. Our first iteration was a simple audience builder that pulled demographic data from all website visitors. We worked closely with the machine learning team to enhance this data with predictions and suggestions on additional factors that could increase engagement based on behavior in other parts of the site.

Personalizing content

With our new WYSIWYG editor, a personalization sidebar allowed editors to select content or entire layouts targeted to specific audiences. These could be further attached to goals, allowing analysts and managers to track completion rates for defined funnels. In combination with the machine learning engine, marketing teams would have the ability to tweak and iterate on campaigns to reach the highest conversion.

Analytics

Lastly, I worked closely with the rest of the product teams to create a unified analytics page. We found that the top concern for marketing teams working with personalization was the ability to see how a given campaign or audience had performed. The most common comparisons were which pages were visited most, how this segment compared to other segments and the percentage of completion within a funnel.

The experience

Pet named, “Horizon,” the visual and interaction revamp of Sitecore’s core product was a huge lift across all teams. While I led the design and strategy for the Personalization and Machine Learning areas, it was in close collaboration with the design systems team, the visual editor team, and countless technical architecture teams. It was an invaluble experience of working across a matrixed organization

  • New UX and visual design for personalization tool
  • Executive stakeholder management and design strategy