Product Management and UX/UXS

Dennis M.

Lead, Create, Innovate | Product & UX

/01 Pureprofile

Process for Finding Solutions

Overview

Based on the mantra of, “why guess, when you can ask?” Pureprofile enables consumers to create, manage, and enrich their online profiles. Pureprofile then monetizes these profiles with global brands, publishers, and advertisers, using proprietary big data technology and programmatic targeting.

An underdog in the US, a brand unrecognized, Pureprofile needed an unconventional way to bring users on board and keep them interested from account setup to 10,000 questions answered.

Challenge: how can Pureprofile deliver content to users while giving them a sense of progression & system intelligence?

My solutions started with questions less about content and stickiness, and more about core business values—specifically, data value:

• What is an account holder’s data worth?

• What is the rate of exchange on AH’s data?

• How does this exchange build levels & access within the user’s feed?

High-level User Journey: Know the client and consumer needs

The 1 st step is a brainstorming and sketching session to understand the client needs, this can come through client interviews or a business strategy discussion.

The goal of this is to uncover the immediate, midterm, and long-term product needs as a rough sketch, and to find a way to project the right decisions & solutions down the road.

By creating a basic framework and core loop for how users engage with the platform, and defining where business drivers meet consumer needs, it was easy for me to start visualizing in paper the process by which the user will learn the behavior that brings Pureprofile into daily consumer usage.

Paper prototype to test concept.

Where possible, I move quickly. Get to as many tangible results vs. having all the right results… Always facilitating the creative process.

I believe there are kernels of the right solution in each attempt, each iteration, each distinct idea progression. I find them. Make them real.

Paper is one of the simplest ways to flesh out products. Analyzing stakeholder interviews, and building from the institutional knowledge of the company vision, I was able to put together a paper prototype of Pureprofile’s logic engines and feed. This made the transition to programming very fast since the rules/algorithm, user engagement & methods, and interactions were easy to see, touch, and emulate in paper with the team.

From paper prototype to 1st functional iteration.

From paper to a digital prototype, so stakeholders can see results in several days vs. weeks or months.

Results: A working prototype revealed innovative ways for users to filter content, and to inform users as to how their profile influenced the content being served to them.

/02 GreenBook.org

Client Relationship as a Function of Product

Overview

Known as “The” Market Research directory for the research industry, GreenBook has been a long-time staple for finding the right seller of research and marketing for every buyer’s needs. The primary channel for the directory was hardcopy for decades. It moved online with the Pureprofile platform in 2013, and is now available in mobile web.

A traditionally analog company, GreenBook was moved to big data by the Pureprofile platform. An incredibly slow rollout plagued with bugs, the account was in jeopardy when I came on board in 2013.

Challenge: stabilize the existing platform, revive client relationship, and consistently delivery eCommerce product innovation.

To pivot from a frequently broken build, a tenuous client relationship, and moving a non-digital client to a mobile web experience, I had to be strategic, calculated, and focused on client results. This was resolved in just over a year.

Establishing the future vision and communicating the GreenBook platform's capabilities.

In order to move GreenBook forward, the client relationship had to be revitalized. Trust had to be re-established.

The goal was to evolve the client relationship in order to push a more innovative mobile web product experience forward.

Digital evolution wasn’t possible without first proving our reliability to the client. Going forward, everything coming from the development team would be reliable (QA, Project Management, etc.). I rebuilt the team in India with a focus on quality, responsiveness, and achievable results through a clear and meaningful backlog that mapped a path from frustration to mobile web success.

Focus on the directory mapping to user's behaviors

GreenBook was a complete turnaround in the development process and client relationship.

Process changes resulted in an accelerated trajectory of the relationship allowing both GreenBook and Pureprofile to fully realize a mobile web experience across the entire platform.

This is by far one of my strongest client relationships. It evolved to this level by listening to the client needs, establishing a process for achieving results, and working in partnership with GreenBook’s GM to strategize a long-term approach to moving the existing web experience to a mobile web destination for the entire research industry.

/03 Programmatic Profiling Widget

Overview

Programmatic profiling technology provides consumers the capability to improve their own experience on a publisher’s website by participating directly in shaping their own profile. The longer term vision is to provide an environment where people are able to curate their own ads – giving consumers more control over the advertising they do/don’t see on a website.

When building something poised to change an industry, the number of unknowns are too high to start crafting meaningful user stories, and getting the technical team right to work.

Challenge: transform Pureprofile’s existing survey technology to leverage programmatic media techniques, so clients can more effectively target consumers.

More needed to be known about how systems were intended to integrate to provide a seamless profiling solution that could be adopted by any type of client (i.e. publishers, brands/products, and account holders).

• How would we capture consumer & contextual data?

• What tools were needed to accomplish programmatically profiling consumers?

Internet advertising and marketing are clunky. They don’t provide an elegant solution for identifying when consumers are looking for a product, event, etc., or what the best product, event, etc. is for the consumer.

The goal is to eliminate the noise as best as possible and provide a new way for consumers to see ads when they are actually looking for a product.

My approach was to create a features list based on the in situ mockup. These features were primarily based on knowing the user being profiled, and the page the user is viewing the profiling technology. Being able to effectively analyze this data, would require a system that for a 1 st iteration could present to a user his or her relevant profile and page data.

The system definition only brought light to a portion of the roadmap. There was more than just the technical application of building systems. The consumers and clients also played a pivotal role. Understanding their needs would help formulate the best product roadmap.

The outcome of the system schematic sketch was a decision to take a deeper look into the user journey.

By using slightly higher fidelity mockups to sketch how user data could be sourced across several sites, it became clear to me that the first project to be prototyped was a tool that would understand not only the consumer; but the page the consumer was on.

There were several ways to approach programmatic profiling. I chose to use an innovation metric I created to determine what technology to tackle first.

Results: A homegrown spider technology is being created that will allow Pureprofile to crawl page data and simultaneously collect behavioral data.

This metric can allow a business to understand commercial value, how well the intended technology can push the company vision forward, and which technology would have the greatest potential to touch the most users.

THANK YOU