Condé Nast relies on multiple external services and internal teams to create marketing units for its brand sites. My team sought to build a single service that would increase velocity, testing capabilities, performance, and overall control of consumer marketing interactions. The tool we created, the Journey Service, empowers our coworkers regardless of technical ability to generate multiple onsite experiences based on targeting parameters using a content management system.
Before beginning any design or development, I researched our objectives, wrote user stories, tracked each desired state and possible state change, and mapped out all user flows.
I created and revised wireframes, compositions, language, and flows with consultation from Condé Nast’s user platform team. I worked with and on the front-end framework and component library consumed by Condé Nast’s internal tools to meet the Journey Service’s needs.
Development used a combination of GraphQL, Apollo, MySQL, Knex, AWS Lambda, Webpack, MustacheJS, React, Hapi, and SCSS. After user testing our prototypes, the first iteration of the Journey Service went live in mid-2020. Since then we have introduced new features such as campaigns, timing tools, and onboarded 7 new brands including Wired, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
The Journey Service created an immediate impact, including doubling subscribers of one user segment in the first week of its roll-out. Hopeful new features of the service include delivering news alerts, attaching calls to action to articles based on topic, inserting interstitial pages based on user data, and styling a suite of stories to create the look and feel of a special issue.