Torchlite
It’s all of your marketing, all in one place.
The Setup
The Setting: Torchlite is a SaaS marketing management platform. The Torchlite marketplace allows users to quickly hire freelance marketers and seamlessly integrate them into their marketing activities.
Torchlite is looking to expand the planning and execution tools available in their platform, giving users more insight into their upcoming events and the workload being carried by their employees and freelancers.
Problem Space: Events, campaigns, pop-up sites, conferences… There are a million different ways that marketers spread their message. With Torchlite, all of this information can live in one place and be quickly shared between employees and freelance workers so everything goes off without a hitch. The only problem is, that “one place” doesn’t currently exist.
Project Duration: 6 weeks
The Problem Space
Marketing directors currently store a huge amount of data within the Torchlite system, but there is no place to view this data in an easily digestible way.
Freelancers that are being added to projects need a place to quickly get up to speed
Personas: Marketing Director, Freelancer
Goal: Provide an overview of existing and proposed marketing operations so marketing directors can quickly understand and execute their plan, and freelancers can onboard quickly onto the marketing team.
Research and Insights
To understand the current state of the system we brought in several marketing directors and freelancers and conducted:
- Interviews
- Co-design sessions
- Guided design workshops
It quickly became clear we were missing something fairly obvious: a calendar. What was less obvious was what exactly this calendar needed to do.
Sketching the System
Nearly all good UX work starts on a whiteboard. Working with our CTO, I shared the data collected during the research phase and we began to parse out the pieces of this new feature.
When planning any event or campaign, marketing directors need to track a wide variety of things: people, dates, deliverables, objectives, locations and timing - just to name a few. We needed a way to show all of these things in one easily consumable feature.
Once we'd defined these details, I started sketching the system and working on a prototype to test.
The Final Design
After several rounds of prototyping and testing, I developed high-fidelity mockups for the final design. I worked together with the CTO and engineering team to piece this design out into a step-by-step development cycle that would add additional functionality at each step while allowing me to test and validate the design along the way.
The design allows both marketing directors to quickly sketch out plans for the future by adding events to the calendar. Once details have been decided, the director can integrate these details into the existing event and sync them with the Torchlite system in order to track progress.
Recently activated freelancers can utilize this view to quickly familiarize themselves with projects. This helps them contribute to the goals of the marketing department more quickly and efficiently than they could before.
User Feedback
“This is great! I can finally keep everything in one place!”
“It always took such a long time to ramp onto a project, this should really help speed that process up.”