Dods Information
Improving Dods Monitoring service experience
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study.
Overview
Dods Monitoring is a personalised intelligence service that helps organisations understand and react to political and policy issues, as they emerge and inform their public affairs strategies.
The service uses the latest technology to deliver tailored, up-to-the-minute news and information to users’ desktop or mobile device in the form of bespoke email alerts tailored according to subject, content and scheduling preferences.
The Challenge
Already a leader in the marketplace, Dods needed to redesign their email alert templates dispatched via their Monitoring system. With two major competitors in the marketplace that provided a similar service, Dods needed to gain a competitive edge by improving their service to better serve content to their premium subscriber base.
My Role
I lead the UX work, producing all major deliverables and presenting these to the client.
I worked alongside Dods Monitoring team of consultants and researches who had direct contact with their customers to conduct user interviews and find out about their user needs, desires and varying contexts of use.
I executed wireframes and design specs and partnered with a lead designer to produce visual designs and style guides for the communications.
Research & Discovery
Template audit
After running through a myriad of existing templates I discovered that whilst there were lots of individual named emails which were sent out, many of them used the same template, only titled differently. I was able to narrow down the number of templates needed for all the different types of communications sent by the system to just six templates.
Usability inspection
I then conducted an interface and design evaluation of the six main templates dispatched by the service and provided detailed recommendations for email design in the context of user experience and the best practice for email design and development.
User interviews
Insights from the discovery work indicated that whilst users valued the service and the content delivered to them, the communications were repetitive and lacked consistency in terms of ‘look and feel’.
We also discovered that ability to access emails whilst on the move and to share information with colleagues were essential to our users. They were frustrated with the way that messages displayed on their mobile devices, content was hidden or poorly formatted. Users also expected Dods to provide them with an easy and intuitive way to forward their messages to colleagues as part of the service.
The Design Process
Seamless user experience across all channels
The research highlighted that in order to provide users with an integrated type of communication, it was important to implement consistent branding across all channels and touch points including subscription interface, subscription maintenance and unsubscribing, website and social media pages so that overly-stimulated users could instantly recognise who the message came from.
Responsive and Mobile Optimised
Analytics also revealed that over 68% of email opens occured on mobile and since the emails were not mobile optimised there was a risk of of loss of engagement with the customer.
The Solution
Consistent ‘Look & Feel’ helps users identify the brand and product context and create a link between them.
