Adobe is keen on personalization. Personalization has featured prominently in its marketing messages in recent years. Its solutions, especially Adobe Target, provide the underpinnings for creating and delivering a personalized experience. And in its announcements last week of Adobe Marketing Cloud enhancements now in beta, it delivered the interfaces for its clients – marketers—to personalize their work environment. Personalization for the personalizers, if you will. Or even if you won’t.
Among the many challenges for digital marketers is communicating with a very broad constituency. There are the people working on the same campaigns, the people focused on audiences touched by a campaign, the people managing brands, the people in charge of corporate communications, the people counting the beans spent or gathered as a result of all this activity, the product managers wringing their hands about sales, the sales team wringing their hands, etc.
Each person, each campaign, each issue, requires very specific communications. The classic answer to this dilemma is a)more meetings and slides, and b)use reportwriter to make yet another report. Two inadequate answers, which lead to lots of extra effort and pretty poor communications pretty often.
With Adobe’s latest UI advance, marketers pin the relevant stuff – images, reports, documents, goals, analyses etc.—to a board, and designate an audience for the board. Everyone in the audience can mark up the items on the board, and add items. Suddenly, we’re all looking at what’s relevant (instead of looking at the latest standard report), and all of what’s relevant (instead of pawing through various file systems hoping to find the right version of the right document). When something needs clarification, you add an arrow and a question. Someone else adds an answer and a circle. Or whatever. When the topic on the board is no longer hot for you, stop looking at the board.
Suddenly, the marketers UI shifts from lists of words that represent a hierarchy of objects and tasks, to the visual realm most marketers think in. A spaceship image instead of SPACECMPGN2.
This interface, pinterest transported to business software, seems pretty space age to me. I haven’t seen it in other business solutions, but hope to. If you’ve been using one, let me know about your experience.
On Target 