Introduction

At Kepler, our engineering team focuses on building marketing tools within the Kepler Intelligence Platform (KIP). This platform empowers over 500 employees to plan, execute, and analyze marketing strategies effectively.

Control is a tool within KIP that provides a feed of automatically generated marketing data insights (or as we like to call them, analyses) –– driving optimization decisions for marketing campaigns set up by Kepler analysts.

The good & the bad

When KIP Control was launched in 2019, it achieved two objectives:

1. help clients and analysts understand how their campaigns were performing
2. save analysts time by automating data cleaning, transformation and visualization –– all of which was previously done manually

However, as we continued to add cards to each advertiser's feed, our users' average in-app session length reduced. It became harder to:

1. find specific analyses, and
2. understand which analyses were available in their feeds

The columnar layout also meant that it became hard to compare cards side-by-side, which was also becoming important to users.

Our goal with the redesign was simple –– make KIP Control's analyses easier to discover and view.

Research & planning

Our research and planning centered on optimizing content structure and organization –– we sought solutions that addressed similar challenges in other contexts. This meant looking for inspiration from a variety of sources –– Dribbble and Behance were useful, but also apps that we used on a daily basis.

The solution

We focused on two key design changes to the app:

1. Overhauling our analysis card content structure

We heavily cut down content within cards to prioritize essential information and condense card size, transitioning to a 3-column grid layout, with 12 cards visible above the fold.

This was an improvement from the previous single column structure, where users were typically limited to viewing one card at a time.

Any information that used to be within each card in-feed was now set up within a detail page that was accessed by clicking the card.

2. Updating our filters setup to help with discoverability

We expanded filtering options to include filtering by analysis name/type, and made them more prominent within the app, using a fixed sidebar for easy access.

In the existing version of KIP Control, filters were accessible via a search bar, with dropdowns for each filter type set up within a popup.

In the redesigned version of KIP Control, filters were set up within a sidebar, with dropdowns switched out for checkboxes. This meant that users were able to quickly gauge which analyses were available in the feed based on which filters present in the sidebar.

Conclusion

We introduced the new KIP Control in late 2023 as a beta, and the app was rolled out to all users in late March 2024.

We're already looking at opportunities to improve on our updates. Some key areas for enhancement include:

1. Enhancing the UX for comparing analyses over date ranges, and
2. Transitioning away from a chronological timeline to enable better feed organization

We believe this redesigned KIP Control lays a strong foundation for implementing the mentioned improvements and beyond.