Who is Seismic?

Seismic focuses on sales enablement and content management solutions. Their platform helps organizations improve sales effectiveness by centralizing and organizing marketing materials, sales content, and collateral in one easily accessible location.

Project Context

A variable is a placeholder in dynamic content that represents dynamic information and defines what will output in that space after the content is generated. In the existing web app, variables are created and managed individually within each template; these are referred to as local variables. There is no association between variables from template to template, even if they are exactly the same and no way to copy, paste, or share them. Manual creation is the only way to add variables to a template which results in extensive manual work to create and update variables across templates. For these reasons, many customers do not realize the full benefit of Seismic’s content creation tools because they exclude data automation from their solutions. In this project, we set out to create global variables that can be inserted into any piece of content and managed in one place.

Discovery

We conducted customer interviews and analyzed local variables to identify personas as well as establish key use cases for variables. Through our analysis of current variable usage, we were able to decide which variable types to prioritize and create first.

Phasing out the project

We decided to prioritize creating user profile and custom value variables first. More variable types were to be added in phases as described below.

In the first phase, we launched custom value variables, variables that have fixed values determined by the creator of the variable and user profile field variables, such as user names and profile photos. The second and third phases consisted of adding CRM variables and image variables, respectively. In the fourth phase, user input variables were added, which are variables that require the end user to input a value from a list established by the variable creator through a data source or manual list.

Establishing Patterns

After identifying use cases and the types of variables user can create, I established patterns for visual elements such as icons, selectors, and thumbnails.

Designing the flow

Starting with the most used local variable types, I designed a variable creation flow, making sure to keep scalability in mind as we added new variable types in the future. Below is an example of creating an end user input variable.

The Result

We started integrating with other product areas to bring global variables platform wide. Global variables bolstered Seismic's content automation features and created a more cohesive content creation where live documents could be connected to one another and automatically updated without the manual creation of local variables within individual templates. Below is an example flow of how global variables are used.