Unleashing Ion Interactive's potential
Ion Interactive enables marketing teams to build interactive content, such as landing pages, quizzes, and infographics, without a line of code. It also offered A/B testing, event tracking, analytics, and data aggregation. Most customers never touched any of it. I led the research to figure out why.
I ran discovery, usability testing, workshops, and training sessions with both internal teams and customers in the US. I ran the cross functional workshop that got leadership aligned on a new direction, then designed the self-service analytics experience that replaced CS-mediated reporting.
The problem
When a marketing manager wanted to know how her latest campaign was performing, she emailed her account manager and waited. Two or three days later, a PDF landed in her inbox with last week's numbers in a format she couldn't customize and couldn't share without reformatting.
The platform she was paying for had a full analytics engine behind a menu she'd never clicked, because nothing in the product surfaced it.
The pricing model made things worse. Customers paid based on content pieces created, not features used. Power users were penalized for doing more. Casual users had no incentive to explore. Low feature adoption, high CS dependency, and a revenue model that worked against engagement.
Research
I interviewed and surveyed US-based customers from solo agency owners to enterprise marketing teams from companies such as General Electric, SalesForce and DHL. The user base was at least four audiences, each with fundamentally different needs. For example:
- A small agency needed templates and speed.
- A marketing analyst wanted self-serve data access.
- An enterprise marketing manager wanted shareable dashboards.
- A web designer wanted full creative control and preview environments.
A content-quota pricing model couldn't serve any of them. They needed different feature bundles at different price points, which spelled out a structural shift parred with a UI redesign.
Strategic direction
I presented findings to senior leadership and facilitated a remote workshop in Miro to align C-levels, VPs, and Directors across teams that had historically operated independently.
The CS team had built their workflow around being the intermediary between users and data. The sales team worried self-service would reduce upsell opportunities. The research had to show that the current model was driving churn rather than loyalty, and that users who actually understood what the product could do would pay more for it.
The workshop produced a framework that mapped user roles to feature based tiers, with feature access replacing content quotas as the organizing principle.
The self-service experience
If users were now self-service, they needed direct access to everything CS had been interpreting for them. I designed dashboards, report builders, geographic analysis, and alert configuration. The platform was old and the technical constraints were real — several initial solutions weren't feasible, and the collaboration with Ion's Tech Lead to find workable alternatives was some of the most pragmatic design work I've done.
Outcome
The new analytics experience launched in 2022 and was adopted by 100% of the customer base. The results were:
- +37% WAU
- 1.8× deliveries
- -58% CS time spent on delivery support
What started as a product design project turned into something bigger: the research didn't just change the interface, it changed the company's business model.
The project was recognized internally as a UX best practice at Rock Content. Ion Interactive has since separated into an independent company and continues to operate as such.