Quotient Analytics Introduction
Quotient Analytics is our next generation data content platform, with the objective to provide reporting and data services that allow both Internal and External users, across CPG and Retail, to make data-driven decisions in support of their businesses.
Since its launch, Quotient Analytics have more than 1,400 active users across 500+ CPG companies and retailers.
Here are a few today’s top clients:
Project Overview
The Quotient Analytics portal is the customer-facing platform on which reporting, research, and other data assets are published, as well as the forum through which customer action is enabled: Packaged reporting & analytics, Self-service reporting & analytics, Data search & visualization, Data feed/API activation & management, Self-service customer segmentation.
The Quotient Analytics platform offering eventually comprises of the following core components: Data Activation, Personalization, Segmentation, Targeting, Industry and Custom research, Customer data analyses.
Problem
Existing reporting structure and limitations:
Quotient Technologies currently has several disparate data services and reporting applications servicing its CPG & Retail clients, which often results in limited data insights, mismatched data between sources, and a non-intuitive data experience for end users.
It looks something like this:
Goals and Product definition
The need for a refreshed data and analytics platform has become apparent as a result of new business use cases, the need for improved reporting flexibility and interactivity, increases in the complexity of analysis desired by our clients, and the introduction of multiple sources of truth.
My Role
Insights & Ideation
I started the project with research (conducted internal and external user surveys and questionnaires) and ideation. Started discussions with the project stakeholders and partnered with product managers of the existing products to uncover and understand insights and translate concepts into features that address customer behaviors and motivations.
Planning, Scope Definition and Coordination
Worked closely with product manager on defining the product, by contributing in creation of the PRD. Evangelized customer goals and balanced business goals. Helped to prioritize and negotiated features for launch and beyond. Collaborated with product managers and engineers to translate product features for each platform context.
Experience Strategy & Vision, Design Execution & Validation
Designed the application from scratch. Starting from interviews, creating personas, use cases, work flows, frameworks and prototypes, design principles, and content strategy. It helped to evangelize ideas, gain alignment, and drive decision making.
Leadership
Designed up and presented to executives, senior leadership team, and many other teams to get alignment and buy-in throughout the project lifecycle.
Process
This is an illustration of the Design Process I try to follow throughout the project.
Some examples:
Understanding the User
Research
Conducted several semi-structured interviews and contextual inquiries to better understand the user’s hardships and needs. Had quick and open-ended interviews to find out the current problems that our internal and external users are facing.
Here what some of the users say:
"Poor report performance" - Reports taking several minutes to load (or timing out).
"Limited data insights" - Users currently have access to limited insights such as activation/redemption totals by campaign/date range, but have limited visibility into user/brand/category activity and must manually calculate other key performance metrics.
"Limited data visualizations" - Data is primary presented in tabular form in the current tool, with limited availability of compelling data visualizations to drive faster data insights.
"Poor data hygiene" - The lack of a recurring QA process for company/campaign naming convention data in the current tool results in many duplicate, non-standardized, and unnecessary entries.
Persona
After doing the research, talking to our internal users, the clients and external customers. I thought now would be a good time to create personas and start thinking about user stories and scenarios. Work on some user task and user flow diagrams.
Personas created: External CPG Customer and Retailer Customer, Internal Account Manager (for CPG and Retail clients). There are a couple of examples above.
User Task Examples
Based on what I learned from my research and analyses I started to construct flows of how users would interact to accomplish their certain tasks.
Additionally, after working with the product manages on the first iteration of the product requirements document I decided to get more specific and to incorporate some of the details of the reporting into the flow and imagine how our personas would think and behave in certain situations.
Design
Ideations: For the ideation session I had to setup multiple meetings with different groups of team members so, I could collect wide range of ideas. Help came from other members of the design team, operation and product managers.
Next, I spent the time processing and sorting out all the ideas from the teams, documenting the process and moving on to the sketching of some key UI screens, layouts and flows.
Information Architecture: After analyzing all the collected information and reviewing PRD with the product manages I started to work on organizing the content in hierarchies and creating a site map.
Wireframes, Prototypes and More Testing: Finalizing the first round of iterations, working on creating sketches and low-fidelity wireframes of the main UI screens, layouts and flows to detail the points of user interaction. I use Axure RP app to create interactive prototypes and user walkthrough to use it in the team design reviews and user testing.
High-fidelity wireframes, UI Guidelines and Specs: It’s time to narrow down and finalize. Working on high-fidelity wireframes helps me to finalize the UI, narrow down the interaction, behaviors, functionalities and describe it in writing, to have a clear picture of the user experience flow for product manages, designers, developers and testers.
Here are some examples of the wireframes.
Visual Style Guide and Final Mockups (Desktop) - Working closely with visual designer on defining products visual language and communicate design goals to the team. Helped creating a design system that would evolve over time with the growth of the product.
Mobile App - Final Mockups
Animated prototypes examples
Used Adobe apps to create interaction prototypes.
Selecting New Report
User Interaction: Navigating to the menu and selecting ‘Promotion Details’ report.
Default view of the report shows basic KPIs and the campaigns performance trends of a selected company.
Selecting Campaigns
User Interaction: User have the option to select one or more items in the campaigns list, to view additional metrics.
Outcome
The campaign performance metrics would help clients to plan promotional campaigns based on performance, compare trends across key metrics, and optimize campaigns. They can also use the market category data to evaluate market share and offer strategies, identify opportunities to be more competitive, and understand consumer activity by retail channel.
Since its launch in the second half of 2018. Quotient Analytics already serves more than 500+ CPG companies and Retailers. Brands are increasingly relying on Quotient Analytics, as a self-serve data and analytics platform. Our clients already have run over 34,000 reports and optimized future campaigns with over 1,000 measurement studies – and growing.
Here are a few of our biggest clients:
“The analytics are far more robust than anything we've had before. This will be enormously helpful as we
plan and optimize promotional programs across our brands.”
- CHERYL RILEY Senior Manager Coupon Strategy & Analytics at Kellogg’s
