Pijn Pages
A powerful platform that turns videos into interactive campaigns
TL;DR
I was responsible for the Systems Design, UX, UI, and Frontend Development for a niche landing-page-generating SaaS application. I took a concept full of complicated use-cases and came up with something elegant and profitable.
The Brief
My client wanted to create a campaign builder that would allow him to quickly create video-based campaigns. These campaigns could be used by clients for lead-gen, sales team compensation tracking, training, marketing, etc. They would also collect engagement data and generate graphs and dashboards of all the metrics that his clients cared about.
The idea was a good one that had been proven. It was time to turn a very manual process into an automatic one, and one that his clients could eventually use by themselves.
I was brought on alongside a good friend (and brilliant developer). The client and I worked together to turn his idea into something that was achievable, scalable, and profitable. I handled the product design, UX, UI, and frontend development; my colleague handled the backend architecture and API.
Our goal was to create an application that would:
- Allow an administrator to create and manage clients/organizations
- Allow clients to log in to see and export campaign engagement data
- Enable clients to build and edit complex campaigns with a few mouse clicks
- Generate a fully customized, responsive, and adaptable public-facing campaign page
The Research
The smart folks behind Pijn Pages had been bootstrapping the idea by manually building campaigns every time a client wanted to spin up a new campaign. He came to us to drastically simplify the number of steps it took to generate a new campaign landing page.
The benifit of dog-fooding his idea for months was that he came to us with a good sense of how users interacted with campaigns, what was important to his clients, and the similarities between all campaigns. He knew who his ideal user was and how they'd use the application.
This allowed us to jump into wireframes and flows very quickly.
The Design
We knew we'd need to design a place for Administrators and Campaign Owners to log in to manage/build campaigns, and a series of public-facing pages, including the campaign landing page that would get generated.
My client had a great aesthetic sense and a real passion for making the Campaign Owner's experience beautiful and usable. That tipped us in the direction of designing and building everything from scratch.
I started with the core of the Campaign Owners' experience: the Campaign Builder.
My goal was to create an admin UI that was beautiful, flexible, and scalable. Once I spent the time to nail down the IA and structure of all the editable bits, I got to work designing and building the frontend of the campaign builder.
Most of the fields of the campaign builder come with intelligent defaults, allowing a campaign owner to launch a fully-functional campaign in less than a minute. To make that speed and simplicity goal a reality, the campaign builder had to be matched with an insanely flexible public-facing campaign landing page design.
The campaign page handles variability like a champ. Besides being fully responsive, it can gracefully handle any combination of settings and preferences, including color scheme, content of any length, and completely disabled sections.
Behind the scenes, there's an elegant and scalable architecture collecting form submissions and user engagement data. All of this data is presented back to the campaign owner on a customized dashboard that allows them to see results in real-time.
What I Learned
This project taught me how to design for flexibility. When the project started, we had a loose idea of what success looked like. But as we continued to build and show the client what we were capable of, we couldn't help but suggest technical solutions to solve business constraints or supercharge his business plan.
The greenfield design part of this project was a ton of fun, but it taught me quickly the value of not designing myself into a corner. I had to make sure the designs were flexible enough to handle whatever brilliant idea we threw at it.