About Madden Communications
Madden Communications are management, production, and logistics experts. Their primary focus is to take sophisticated nation-wide promotional merchandising and making it simple.
Madden Communication builds solutions for large scale branded promotional campaigns. They provide their customers with a single-page web application for multiple user types that works with a unique methodology. The application gathers insights into a company’s promotional marketing and merchandising demands and then integrates that into all elements of the supply chain and down to the final retail executions.
Inspire confidence and drive excitement
In our initial meetings with Madden Communications, we came to a consensus that their users had difficulty with order entry, and there were also opportunities to improve product discovery.
We had several interviews with stakeholders, and their IT team focused on catalog browsing and extra functionality. We knew that improving the look and feel will inspire confidence and drive excitement for the customer sales representatives, distributors, and decision-makers to use this tool.
Our discovery about the user’s journey informed our solution for improving the user experience:
- Design a space for users to see their progress when pre-ordering
- Introduce a way for users to set updates to the status of an order’s process
- Simplify the process in the pre-ordering workflow
- Create pathways for users to navigate contextually throughout the application
A phased approach
Madden’s goals for this web application involved improving multiple sides of the interface for a variety of user types. Our approach was to break it up into a series of prioritized assignments
- Catalog / Homepage
- Pre-Order interface
- Executive Dashboard
Discovery
Key Learnings
- Implementing established design patterns users were familiar with was successful in improving the order entry process
- The use of progressive disclosure during the browsing phase of the user’s journey improved engagement and product discovery
Technology collaboration
The updated application we were building had some technical constraints due to the complexity of the warehousing and inventory management system that would need to be integrated into the front end. Our team provided technical guidance for front end development so that when we handed off the code, we knew it would work with Madden’s system.
“We engaged Solid Digital to help us re-imagine the user interface of our customer facing ordering portal. The creativity and vision they showed as they produced ideas for us was outstanding. And their technical know-how to implement the options we chose were a “solid” follow through that capped off the engagement and gave us a real win. I highly recommend them to anyone looking for help with creative or technical know-how in the web application design space.”Allan Furman, VP of IT
