FUSIO by Locala is a powerful drive-to-store platform that can attribute digital media investments with real-world results, such as shopper visits into stores. Our product vision is to help our clients, marketers, brands and media agencies to close the digital and physical advertising divide.
In a previous article, we explained how our product team built the components that make up FUSIO’s conceptual model based on the insights gathered from user research.
This article deep-dives into two design strategies used to convey the information necessary for FUSIO users to quickly internalize how the platform works.
User Interface Architecture
Before a user clicks anything on a webpage, they usually browse its visual assets and content to absorb the information it communicates. Our product team leveraged this dwell time to help our target user understand what functions the FUSIO platform could perform.
We began by defining FUSIO’s user interface (UI) architecture, which are the principles governing the platform’s interface – including its global page structure, its information flow between pages and its user navigation.
UI-conceptual model mirroring
Key to FUSIO’s redesign was ensuring that the platform’s architecture matched the user-led conceptual model that Locala’s designers had built for the technology. For this reason, each page within the platform reflects how various ad components interact with the final insertion order (IO).
Take for example this image of the FUSIO platform. A child entity such as media buying, which could not exist in the absence of an IO, can only be accessed from the IO’s card. While secondary components like creative assets are accessed via a different tab.
Positive user feedback during FUSIO’s testing helped validate and confirm this approach. A route to successful interaction is to design based on the user’s understanding of the tasks to be performed, and establishing UI design principles that are synonymous with this.
Meaningful UI Layout and Interaction Consistency
Another important consideration for FUSIO’s product team was how the UI layout of the platform could attach meaning to the components within it.
The placement of a feature on a webpage can speak volumes about what that feature can do and how it influences other components on the page. For this reason, Locala’s designers leveraged well established User Experience (UX) standards to achieve an intuitive UI layout within the platform.
Top-down information flow
A common UX standard applied to pages within FUSIO was a top-down approach to information flow. So as platform users descend from the beginning of a page to the end they go from top-level items – such as the IO dashboard – to more detailed information – like the performance of individual media tactics.
A designer would be breaking the top-down standard if, for example, a filter had an “upwards” effect. So by using FUSIO, advertisers can filter the performance of their drive-to-store campaign via individual store locations (see image below). This action would not, however, impact the delivery of the campaign or its reporting as these features sit above the filter.
As most user behaviour is unconscious, a repetitive pattern like top-bottom scope of action can be learnt and applied automatically. By applying familiar UX standards, product designers can save much valued time.
The key to fruitful interaction is taking advantage of the patterns that a user has already internalised, and mirroring a user insight-based conceptual model. This resulted in establishing FUSIO as an intuitive efficiency-enhancing tool for media buying traders.
In the next article, we will learn how the FUSIO platform communicates with the user through feedback and signalling.