Redesign of Campaign Designer
SAP Marketing Cloud • 2016-2021
Transforming Enterprise Marketing Orchestration: I led the complete redesign of Campaign Designer within SAP Marketing Cloud—a business-critical tool enabling marketers to design, orchestrate, and manage sophisticated multi-channel campaigns across email, social media, Google ads, and other digital touchpoints.
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Problem
The legacy interface severely hampered campaign modeling capabilities through its text-only approach. Its rigid structure could not adapt to evolving needs, while persistent usability challenges frustrated users. The outdated architecture created significant development bottlenecks, delaying critical feature implementation. This technical debt not only undermined the customer experience but also directly impacted cloud adoption rates and revenue generation potential.
Approach
I led the cross-functional team of product managers and developers, through a comprehensive process—analyzing competitors, campaign models, facilitating design sprints, evolving from low-fidelity concepts through multiple iterations to polished high-fidelity mockups, and validating our designs through rigorous lab-based usability testing to ensure exceptional user experiences.
Outcome
I delivered a complete UX transformation from initial research to approved UI in just 30 days, then oversaw full rollout to customers within 3 months as committed—successfully implementing an innovative split-panel floorplan in Fiori that achieved feature parity with the legacy system, validated through usability testing, while ensuring the architecture remained scalable and flexible for future features, resulting in the Campaigns Designer that has remained a cornerstone product since its 2016 launch
Process & Deliverables
🆘 "We have a problem!"
The legacy interface severely hampered campaign modeling capabilities through its text-only approach. Its rigid structure couldn't adapt to evolving needs, while persistent usability challenges frustrated users. The outdated architecture created significant development bottlenecks, delaying critical feature implementation. This technical debt not only undermined the customer experience but also directly impacted cloud adoption rates and revenue generation potential.
Senior leadership faced immense pressure to deliver a revolutionary approach, as failure to innovate would likely result in the entire unit being shut down and replaced through acquisition of a competitor.
🧩 Exploring possibilities
We had only 3 months to deliver!
We conducted an intensive three-week design sprint that began with collaborative brainstorming sessions involving key stakeholders, product owners, and architects. Our approach included daily iterations on mockups within a core team, complemented by bi-weekly reviews with extended teams across global regions.
The comprehensive scope encompassed competitive research, development of both low and high fidelity mockups, and rigorous usability testing.
🧭 First design iterations
Based on our initial research including feedback from early adoption customers, we came up with an intial prototype using Fiori's Belize theme and SAP's UI5 components library.
But, there was an engineering problem..
🥊 Reality check
While most of the UI could be built with SAP UI5 components, the modeler was a complex control that would require a custom implementation, which UI5 did not have.
Based on my earlier implementation of a modeling tool, Galilei, in an earlier project, I proposed the idea of using this library as it had most of the modeling capabilities. However the UI needed to be redesigned to consider Galilei's capabilities. We had to forsake some functionality such as colors, custom shapes etc. and to also match the newer Oberon theme.
However, the floorplan I had designed, including functionality such as drag and drop , split panes etc. became a standard UI control in future UI5 implementations, and adopted by other applications in SAP that needed this functionality.
📊 Real users, real insights
We conducted a formative usability test in a lab setting to validate our designs. We invited participants based on our personas, to a lab in Germany. In all we tested with 11 participants, including customers, and received positive feedback.
We had made it. The core features and usability had been validated!
📣 Results that speak
Our complete redesign delivered a vastly improved, modern user interface that transformed the customer experience. The innovative approach introduced several groundbreaking features—including an intuitive designer page, customizable templates, streamlined data selection, and comprehensive KPI dashboards—creating a cohesive, powerful workflow that delighted users.
This transformation dramatically reduced UI/UX-related customer issues while establishing the Campaign Designer as the gold standard across SAP's Cloud Marketing portfolio.
The impact extended beyond user satisfaction to business success, with SAP Marketing Cloud achieving a Leader position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management for the first time in 12 years—a testament to how thoughtful design drives measurable market leadership.