Personalization Strategy Guides
Creating UX Documentation That Enabled Personalized Marketing
At EA we had a personalization team that played a role in helping enable personalization technology within varying platforms. We would support in-game surfacing, the EA app, and email marketing.
My role on the team was to enable the teams we partner with to think about how these surfaces would be used to give them the best placement for successful conversion opportunity and also, help them consider the kind of content they may be putting in those placements.
Because of the nature of this work, we will not be going into the particulars of how the system all works, but simply my interaction with teams and how I supported them.
Creating documentation that helps users find answers
On my first day starting at EA, my manager gave me a mission during my time that would be a guide that would enable people to understand the value of Personalized marketing, How it was implemented, and How people should implement it.
Early goals I had for the projects included:
creating a design audit repository that enabled viewers to see the impact of our past personalization implementations.
Enable people to consider the user journey from both a goal and purposed perspective to help them decide, where content should live and when where would it be most impactful.
I was also encouraged to make a menu to summaries the different types of marketing surfaces, and their mechanical implementation, so readers could understand what could be done in their games and platforms.
One of the tasks that I started with was doing a design audit with the games we had previous collaborations with. I did a design audit around all of the marketing surfaces that were connected to our systems, in Battlefield V, Madden, Anthem, and even with Email. to see what were the positives and negatives around how the teams were implementing content and how the marketing surfaces were doing with users as well.
Design Audits
This led to discoveries that enabled future teams who were implementing our technologies in their game, to approach design in a manner that allowed for greater visibility of the content they wanted players to see.
An example of a discovery that was made from this was in Battlefield V. There was a carousel that had curated content in order of priority based on different teams level of priority.We learned that because the carousel led off screen, most users did not click through the carousel to see the rest of the content, large amounts of content by less prioritized teams did not get viewed at all by the vast majority of players.
Highlighting understandings like these, led game and platform teams to choose marketing surface types that best portrayed content for user consumption.
One thing I was keenly aware of, was the people I was working with, that referenced these documents, were not always UX or visual designers. Often times product managers were the key people reading my documentation. Because of that, I framed my documents in a way that also taught some consideration that a UX designer might impart upon others. One of these concepts I tried to “teach” through my document, was always thinking about these marketing surfaces as points in a user journey.
I would then frame the documentation to ask the user to consider, the purpose of the destination, what kind of content lives there, thinking about what value it provides to players. Then I would ask them to consider the placement, of that marketing destination that best enabled users to succeed. I was fully aware teams would not be working with me at every point in deciding design decisions around these marketing surfaces, so I wanted to impart those questions as they were considering these things.
User Journey Considerations
Aside from having an audit section per game, I split different kinds of Marketing Surfaces into categories that enabled readers to consider the impact, mechanic and implementation style all in one place against each other.
Different Types of Marketing Surfaces
Here you could see broad strokes information, comparing how we implemented similar types of marketing surfaces across games. This area also showed information about requirements people had in regards to how they would implement content in these spaces on the back end, after they were supported. (e.g. character counts in various section of a marketing surface, How many marketing messages can be visible at once, is this algorithmic or curated.)
The impact of this work, was not always calculable in the moment that I was creating it. However based on user feedback from various teams, it had 3 effects.
The teams loved the ability to understand the value of the work our team did by viewing the documentation as a means of promoting the value of personalized content distribution.
The teams loved having the ability to understand and consider the work that we had done previously and enabled them to consider how it would implemented in their new projects.
It also inspired other teams to adopt some of this philosophy internally. Where I highlighted gaps in how they thought about the impact of the personalized marketing surfaces, the teams saw this as an opportunity to consider design more analytically and create more internal documentation that accumulated this data on their own.