Promotion Management on Google Store CMS

Google

Introduction —
I designed the Promotions management system on gCMS, Google Store’s native content management system. I solved for how marketing promotions would be managed, scaled, and evolve with the business’ increasing objectives and needs.

Role, Duration, Platform —
Co-UX Lead, 6 months, Internal CMS


Team —
UX Designer, UX Manager, 3 Engineers, 4-Member Publishing Team


Contribution —
UX Design, Visual Design, User Interviews and Validation,  XFN Collaboration

Problem —
Google Store was unable to scale promotion opportunities because the existing CMS was dated. Catalog publishers could not create, manage, and deploy the business’ desired volume of promotions efficiently.


Context —

  • GCMS was in its third year of development, attempting to reach parity and existing functionality with its legacy systems

  • The original system was a collection of many separate systems


Outcomes —
⭐️ Reduced the number of required catalog publishers from 4 to 2
⭐️ A scalable framework that evolved a dated system
⭐️ Increased overall workflow efficiency through tool, task, and
document consolidation

Core Flow —

Creating a promotion simply meant starting a gCMS document, with required tasks consolidated by default

View flow →

Core Flow —

Code management, including vanity and code batches, was merged into 1 front-end location rather than 4 disparate backend systems

View flow →

Core Flow —

A discount rule creation flow and UI designed to be understandable and easy to build despite their technical and complex nature

View flow →

Result

Although launched in phases over a span of 9 months, the addition of promotions management to the gCMS platform had a sizable impact, largely on operator workflow efficiency. Product managers reported a significant increase in promotion deployment in 2021, with less user publisher resourcing needed compared to past launches.

Next steps

It was a monumental feat to have such a robust MVP that could very well last for multiple quarters. But, there were still many areas that required clean up before UX could even impact a V2. Some outstanding items included:

  • Engineering partners to continue consolidating environments to reduce unnecessary friction that added to the user experience

  • Import spreadsheet functionality to remove final piece of manual input work

  • Finding a way to view Staging code batch names on the interface

  • Scaling Rule set functionality to accommodate discount stacking