Kaleb Loosbrock
Senior Product Designer
We’re excited to share with you what we’ve been working on for the last several months — a new redesigned Skai experience.
Our goal at Skai is to empower marketers around the world to grow their brands. Today, with this re-design, we’re one step closer to that goal.
Why a New Skai?
“The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” — Some really wise dude (Socrates)
Change is inevitable, especially in digital marketing. Navigating through this evolving landscape feels a bit like Frodo hiking his way through Mordor. Even with partners like Skai and solutions like algorithmic bidding, dynamic ads and persona-based marketing, the basic questions still linger:
- How can I hit my goal?
- How much should I spend?
- If I invest $1 more, what can I expect in return?
- What can I do to improve efficiency of my campaigns?
We created Skai to help marketers answer these questions and achieve their goals. In the 10 years since we launched, we’ve embraced change and led innovation in optimization, forecasting and cross-channel marketing — all with the aim of helping our clients find their way.
In that time, the one area that hasn’t really changed much is the design and overall experience. Until today.
The New ‘Shoo,
After countless discussions, user interviews, usability studies and prototypes, we have designed and built a new Skai experience. One that’s built on a solid foundation of design principles inspired by our many talks with people like you. We’d like to present them to you today.
Principle #1: One Skai
Just because the digital landscape is highly fragmented doesn’t mean Skai should be. We know marketers are not on a single channel (or device for that matter) and, as the leading search and social marketing platform, our priority is to be the solution that helps them bridge the gap.
Starting today our experience reflects this priority with one unified look and feel and tools that bridge the digital divide — across channels, devices, audiences and data.
Principle #2: Be Reliable & Accurate
We are part financial planners and part investment bankers. Our customers trust us with their money in order to yield big returns. Reliability and data are the backbone of our product and our client experience.
Principle #3: Be Simply Powerful
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Claire Luce Booth
Skai is a powerful and sophisticated product with a lot of features [and I mean a lot 🙂 ] — but that doesn’t mean it needs to be overwhelming or distracting. We aim for simplicity in everything we do.
Principle #4: Inspire Oohs, Ahs, Ah-ha’s and Action
The new Skai is meant to be more than just visually appealing (ooh) and calming (ah); it’s meant to also inspire ah-ha moments about your data, your marketing, your audience, you name it.
It’s not enough to be beautiful or “sexy”, we want to highlight the interesting, connect the dots, and offer meaning and context. It’s about providing our clients insight into what’s working, what’s not, and why not — and then connecting them to actions they can take immediately.
The new profile wizard in Skai Social is an example of us putting this principle into practice. We could have stopped at just showing you your previous spend. But that’s not insightful. Instead, we went a step further and provided an insights tool directly within the portfolio wizard that shows what you can expect for returns given your targets, goals, and spend, all based on historical performance. And the best part is, you can immediately take action on those insights.
Principle #5: Every Millisecond Counts
Time is money. Every second saved is money in the bank for our clients and time back in their day.
Performance is our top priority, and we’ve already made significant strides in boosting the speed and load time. In tests, we’ve seen up to 240% decrease in the load time on large data sets. But we’re not finished. We’re committed to go even further and faster.
Principle #6: Learn & Grow
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
Change is hard. It can be a challenge to get an entire team to switch their habits, tools, and mindset. So, throughout our entire redesign process, we tried to keep “beginner’s mind.”
Even though we’re updating Skai to be more intuitive and less complex, we have to shed light on the new features and flows. We’ve added helpful interactive product walkthroughs, tips & tricks, and instructive videos to get new Skai-ers and experts alike oriented, informed, and ready to take advantage of all Skai has to offer.
Just the Beginning
This re-design is just the beginning. We have a long road ahead to achieve all of these goals and fully embody these principles; but like all things, you have to set a goal and start somewhere. So these are our goals and the ethos guiding the new Skai experience.
If you’d like to help us along the journey by being involved in usability studies, interviews on new features, or new ideas we’re kicking around, please sign up to be a design research participant. We’d love to hear from you.
