Tagging is the foundational piece that flows throughout Kapost's platform, which enables this B2B software company to provide unparalleled value to it's customers—enterprise-level marketing teams. At the core of this software is Kapost Studio which allows teams to create, collaborate and distribute their marketing content across tools, teams and channels. More often than not, Studio is the birthplace of content and thus, the main area where tagging is applied. After that, tagging is used in other areas of the platform to surface analytics, campaign status and gaps in marketing strategy, among many others.
Our customers were seeing poor adoption rates from their colleagues as thousands of pieces of content were making their way through planned to in-progress to complete with little to no fields filled in. With tagging being such an important action, we knew we needed to improve the user experience around adding tags to content. A few things we heard that helped us begin to understand the problem better.
"It looks like a brick wall—I'm not sure where to start and it's too daunting to dig into."
"I'm not sure which fields apply to me and I don't know if I'm selecting the correct tag"
"I'm so busy and I don't see how this impacts me or my team."
With an objective as vague as "improve tagging", we knew that this project would be going through the entire design process so we could better define what features could be built to improve this experience for our users and provide greater business value. There were a lot of ideas being thrown around the table ranging anywhere from rudimentary glossaries to suggested tags powered by machine learning. After identifying a dozen or so ideas that merited being taken from sketch to design, we sat down with our customers and internal customer success team to get their input on which features would bring their team the most value.
Taking our customers and internal team's feedback under consideration, we selected three features that could really move the needle on improving the user experience: Field Sections, Inheriting Values and a Progress Bar.
Taking the feedback we heard from our customers, we added the ability to create sections within the Custom Fields area on a piece of content. This feature allows our end users to better understand how fields are related and if they pertain to them in a quick and visual way. They are also given the ability to collapse and expand sections based on their interest. Kapost Admins can add sections, give them a description and add any of their instance-wide fields based on the content type defined in the system.
Often times, pieces of Content are assigned to an Initiative—which is essentially a folder for grouping similar Content together for production of a larger campaign. Like Content, these Initiatives are assigned field tags to help define the purpose, target audience and themes, among many other things. This feature allows users to identify which field tags are shared with the associated Initiatives and inherit the selected tags on the Content. Inheriting field values reduces the amount of time required to fill out fields and gives users the confidence of assigning the correct value to the Content.
In the large marketing organizations that are typical of Kapost customers, the importance of tagging is not always seen and, therefore, ignored all together leaving the Kapost admin or project lead to follow behind their colleagues to complete the Custom Fields. For many Kapost users, the thought of filling in the Custom Fields section on each piece of content in it's entirety is a daunting task. For this reason, we added a progress bar to help communicate the importance of tagging and encourage the user to fill in the fields. In addition to the progress bar, status indicators were added next to each field to indicate whether a field has been filled in, incomplete and required, or empty. This helps the user quickly scan the page for fields that still require their attention.
