Software user-experience development is a journey.  It's a lot like the journey of life -  ideally you continue to grow and learn along this journey, and in the case of user experience, our objective is to make our users feel like marketing super hero's when using our software.

Balihoo's local marketing automation platform is considered to be one of the best in the industry, however we're always looking for ways to improve it. Not only do we continually add new functionality designed to benefit affiliates' with local store marketing needs -  but we consistently strive to ensure that the product that we're currently offering continues to evolve and surpass our end-users expectations.  A current enhancement that we're working through is in our cross-medium ad builder process and the user transition from the creative template library into the ad-building and ordering process.  

In the first image below you will see our current creative details UI that was released earlier this year.  This screen is a 'jumping off' point for building an ad and then taking an action with it.  While this iteration was well received over the previous release, we knew there would still be plenty of room for growth.  However one of the best ways to evolve a product is through real user activity! 



Since the time it was deployed we've been gathering feedback through conversion analytics, support calls, training demos and 3rd party usability tests to look for mis-steps in the user experience.  Below is an in-progress version of our next iteration.  There are some minor tweaks we still want to make but overall this new concept tested well prior to development and we are now in the process of building and deploying this to our customers in the next two weeks.    If you look at both screens you'll notice a number of changes including:

• Increased use of thumbnail images over pure text
• Clear link between the version you are looking against the assets you have stored
• Available actions are all available in one place (as your eye scans to the right (always above the fold))
• Clear focus toward action (i.e. conversion) on the page
• Clear differentiation between the master template and versions the user has customized

This is just the tip of a much broader initiative as we work to further simplify the local marketing execution process. We're excited to be continually moving forward to better serve our customer base. Stay tuned for more peeks into this process over the next few months!