My Insights
UX
December, 2024
Interaction Design Practice,
Project 3: Salesforce
Group Project with
Noah Bakken,
Gabriela Pacheco,
and Chloe Arteaga
My Insights is an e-commerce consent management platform (CMP) that shows consumers their data and how it's used to personalize their experience.
The goal of My Insights is to drive stronger brand affinity through consumers being able to see their data.
The tool would replace a site's existing "cookie" collection platform (or consent management platform) and would offer users an in-depth view of the cookies - or data - that a site gathers from them, a first for CMPs.
My Insights offers consumers transparency through two levels of data visibility: high-level shopping habit notifications and detailed data exploration through an intuitive interface. This approach makes data collection engaging rather than invasive.
Why My Insights? (Process)
Our project began with a brief from 3 senior designers at Salesforce:
Craig Birchler (VP of Product Design),
Ries Murphy (Lead Researcher),
and Patrick Hermiller (Senior Product Designer).
Their brief tasked us with "making brand data about consumers more transparent and accessible to them".
As a team, our first objective was to ask questions, and we prepared some questions about the brief for Craig, Ries, and Patrick.
Interview
As a class, we interviewed Craig, Ries, and Patrick
We prepared several questions for our 10-minute interview, the following are a few of them:
Given that Salesforce Marketing Cloud (MC) relies heavily on customer data, what does trust specifically entail for Salesforce, particularly in relation to customer data handling and transparency?
Should our design work be focused on the Marketing Cloud platform itself, or on the third-party site where the end consumer interacts with the brand?
Are we designing for Salesforce's relationship with its customers or for marketers relationships to their end users?
We understand that Salesforce uses third-party integrations such as OneTrust to build trust with customers. What should our solution aim for that is different from what these companies are already doing? What is working and what could be better?
Since every company is organized differently, what is the process for displaying cookies and or data to the end consumers?
We not only received answers to these questions, but also an invaluable quote from Craig:
"Drive stronger brand affinity through consumers being able to see their data.
If you can do that, I'll be impressed."
With that proclamation, our team had a mantra and a more defined objective. We began conducting research, beginning by learning more about data cloud from marketers.
Deloitte Digital Talk
On November 15th, our team attended a virtual talk about Salesforce Marketing & Data Cloud, led by 4 marketing professionals and data analysts at Deloitte Digital. Our goal was to be able to ask questions to marketers, and learn more about marketing and data cloud in the process.
During this talk, we learned several things about Salesforce Marketing Cloud that we hadn't thought to ask about during our interview.
One thing that stuck with us was a list of 4 consumer data types:
Profile Data
Interaction Data
Behavior Data
Preference Data
This talk with Deloitte helped us decide what questions to ask on our consumer survey, where we directly asked consumers to compare their comfort levels with these 4 data types.
We also got the opportunity to ask clarifying questions to the marketers about how data is shared between companies, and how long it's stored for.
Survey Results
139 responses across the US
Survey Insights
This survey outlined a major contributor to consumer distrust of personalized marketing -
a lack of clear information.
A vast majority of surveyed users associate negative feelings with data collection, which they perceive as making them less likely to purchase from a brand that offers personalized marketing.
When asked why they feel this way, many of the responses we received pointed towards a lack of visibility of data collection processes. One user put their concerns very succinctly:
"The less knowledge I have in a subject, the more at risk I am."
With a mantra and some research complete, our team shifted our focus towards sketching, wireframing, and ideating.
Early Concept
"Data Wrapped"
While pondering how to make consumer data visible and approachable, our team started looking to precedents. There aren't many out there, but one we found was Spotify.
Spotify has an annual "wrapped" event where they show their consumers their music listening data, and offer them fun and interesting statistics.
Our team started to reimagine how this concept might work for e-commerce. We imagined that a retailer like Amazon might be able to create a catchy persona that a user fit into based on their shopping history, and walk them through how they came to that conclusion.
Our first round of user testing helped us realize that we needed to get back to the fundamental ask of the design brief: transparency. By providing users with fun statistics and catchy personas, we weren't treating them with the honesty that they deserve. Between user testing and our consumer survey, we learned that a certain level of reverence has to be paid to a person's data, because it's often deeply personal information.
We learned that the same data can be, and often is, communicated with varying levels of transparency. We mapped them out on this spectrum:
Both ends of the spectrum have their weaknesses. 'Fun' data can be eye-catching, but it also might feel demeaning or dishonest. On the other hand, raw data is very transparent, but it could be seen as creepy / stalker-ish if it's given to a consumer without explanation. My Insights should be a tool that's in the middle. We brainstormed and sketched how we might show data in an honest, friendly way.
