Case study · Seismic · Product Design
Seismic — Enterprise Sales Platform
Channels: redesigning NewsCenter and Announcements in Seismic, turning a one-way news page into a place where enablers and sellers communicate, post, and interact.
Company
Seismic
My role
Product Designer (sole designer)
Team
- 1 product manager
- 1 project manager
- 2 engineering teams
Timeline
Apr 2022 – Feb 2024
01
Context
What was NewsCenter?
NewsCenter was Seismic’s platform for internal company updates: one-way communication from enablers to sellers. It was originally built very quickly for a single customer.
NewsCenter’s challenges
Why were these legacy features a problem?
01
Tied to the legacy Profiles feature
It used Profiles-specific copy instead of “Channels.” Managing channels meant going to a separate main nav item, creating one took 10 clicks minimum, and Profiles was tied to Library.
02
Complicated permissions
Pages were only available to Premium users, and publishing to a channel was confusing. The UI was cumbersome, dated, and inflexible, and it didn’t match industry standards, which made it harder to learn.
03
Not easy to browse
Monotonous card tiling made it hard to know where to focus. There was no sorting or filtering, content often wasn’t key for sellers to know, and nothing felt engaging or personalized.
02
Business & user goals
Business goals
Besides solving the challenges legacy NewsCenter presented, the company and the competitive market shaped what NewsCenter needed to become.
01
LiveSocial integration
NewsCenter was identified as an initial integration point for LiveSocial, combining 3rd-party and 1st-party news. LiveSocial’s customer base is heavily financial services, so features like compliance were weighted more heavily.
02
Seismic competitors
A competitor rose quickly in early 2023 with a niche in video recording and browsing. NewsCenter, later Channels, was identified as the place to adopt those core use cases.
User goals
We ran dozens of user interviews with both enablers and sellers to learn what customers really wanted.
01
Better enabler-to-seller communication
Enablers struggled to know how their content was being perceived, or whether it was being seen at all.
02
A more relevant experience for sellers
Sellers found NewsCenter content often wasn’t relevant to their jobs. They often got critical company updates and news from co-workers instead.
03
Don’t add to tool fatigue
Sellers use dozens of digital tools every day and already experience tool fatigue.
03
Early ideas & pivots
Concept 1: Custom Feeds
Our first venture into redesigning NewsCenter was a feature called Custom Feeds.
Goal
- Make it easier for NewsCenter to have fresh, personalized content by integrating key LiveSocial features.
Core features
- Enablers and sellers create personally curated feeds of 3rd-party news.
- AI curates content from across the web.
- Integration of social media sites, like LinkedIn.
Why Custom Feeds didn’t resonate
Custom Feeds went all the way to a pilot, and that’s where big problems emerged.
01
1st- and 3rd-party news didn’t mix
Customers saw the content they created as separate from outside news, and worried 3rd-party articles would pull attention away from what they posted.
02
Compliance issues
Customers were very concerned with regulating which articles showed up. Our built-in filters for profanity and sexual content weren’t enough, so they were hesitant to let sellers use it unregulated.
Product pivot 1
Custom Feeds → Competitive Intel
Research told us that social selling and internal news had very different use cases, and that enablers deeply wanted to regulate and direct what their sellers saw. We stopped the pilot and pivoted to a bottom-up Competitive Intel product, where 1st- and 3rd-party news could coexist under enablers’ control.
Concept 2: Competitive Intel
Goal
- Create an experience where 3rd- and 1st-party news coexist.
Core features
- Coverage of competitors like Klue, Crayon, Kompyte, and more.
- Battlecards: a summary of competitor facts, how to sell against them, how to talk about features, and win/loss ratio.
- AI to pre-populate content.
Why Competitive Intel didn’t resonate
01
Didn’t enable better communication
It focused on competitor updates, but enablers wanted to communicate many other kinds of news too.
02
Wasn’t personalized or engaging
Battlecards were informative, but they weren’t a place to interact with peers.
Product pivot 2
Competitive Intel → peer-to-peer enablement & Announcements
Synthesizing our research made it clear that competitive intel was a team effort between enablers and sellers. We shifted to a dual-pronged solution: Announcements to address enabler needs, and peer-to-peer sharing for sellers.
Concept 3: Channels
Channels came out of a week-long offsite where engineering, product, and design synthesized everything we’d learned and charted a way forward. I led two day-long workshops that aligned our stakeholders and leadership.
Goal
- Allow seller contribution and create an engaging, personalized experience.
Core features
- Posts that both sellers and enablers can create.
- Channels with 3 levels of permissions.
- CMS storage, separate from Library.
- An integrated, updated Announcements.
- Easy browsing: a feed structure, plus content previews that bypass permissions.
Why we chose Channels
Channels covered the large majority of our business and user needs compared with Custom Feeds and Competitive Intel. The one trade-off was LiveSocial: leadership decided it was no longer a priority for NewsCenter and would explore other ways to integrate it.
| Need | Custom Feeds | Competitive Intel | Channels |
|---|---|---|---|
| De-couple from Profiles & Library | – | – | ✓ |
| Increase browsability | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Increase seller personalization and interactions | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Integrate LiveSocial | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Address competition | – | – | ✓ |
| Seller-to-enabler feedback | – | – | ✓ |
| Better enabler-to-seller communication | – | – | ✓ |
| Meet users where they are | – | ✓ | ✓ |
04
The solution: Channels
From needs to features
Each business and user need translated into a feature. The sections below dive into a few of them.
| Business & user need | Feature |
|---|---|
| De-couple from Profiles & Library | UX architecture and backend revamp |
| Increase browsability | New landing page + content previews |
| Increase seller personalization and interactions | Post interactions: commenting and liking |
| Address competition | Native video recording and posting |
| Seller-to-enabler feedback | Commenting and liking |
| Better enabler-to-seller communication | Announcements, featured posts, and regular posts |
| Meet users where they are | External notifications |
UX architecture revamp
In the original NewsCenter, creating a channel meant jumping between Profile Builder, NewsCenter, and profile settings. In the redesign, we deliberately co-located channel creation with channel browsing, so people can create channels and content right inside Channels.
OriginalSpread across Profile Builder and NewsCenter
- NewsCenter
- Profile Builder
- Channels
- Create new profile
- News channel
- Add thumbnail, title, description
- Create channel
- Publish channel
- Profile settings
- Users
- Add users
NewAll inside Channels
- Channels
- Create channel
- Name and choose channel type
- Channel created
- Channel members modal
- Add users
11 → 6
clicks to create a channel and take it live
Before: legacy channel creation
After: new channel creation
New landing page: concepts
I explored three directions for the landing page.
01
News inspired
Various card sizes emphasized certain articles, making it easier to know where to focus.
02
Separation of sections
Featured articles stood apart from the rest, and exploring other channels was encouraged.
03
Single-column feed
The feed encouraged scrolling and mirrored most social media sites.
New landing page: v1
We chose the single-column feed for v1 because it was familiar, so sellers wouldn’t have to learn an entirely new tool.
New landing page: v2 (final)
01
Include content previews
Content previews were essential for MVP: they let sellers stay on the page and keep browsing.
02
Make creation front and center
We wanted it to be clear to sellers that this was a place to post and interact, not just view content.
03
Align with the design system
The design system is always evolving, so I made sure to use the latest components, like the white header and tertiary nav.
05
Announcements
Where we started
Announcements was a relatively hidden feature living in system settings. It didn’t match the latest design system, and it lacked basics like text styling, links, and image uploads.
Announcements redesign v1
01
Update the UI to the design system
The legacy UI looked dated and didn’t match the rest of the product.
02
Add common customer requests
Many customers had built their own workarounds for things like text styling and cover images.
03
Make storage and organization clearer
It was hard to tell which announcements were active. We added a description preview and surfaced states like published, scheduled, and expired.
Announcements redesign v2
Requirements changed once Channels was green-lit. Both Announcements and Channels improved enabler-to-seller communication, so Announcements moved into Channels. Since Channels already had a simple content creator, we reused it rather than build two rich text editors.
01
Move to Channels
Both features enhanced enabler-to-seller communication.
02
Integrate with the post creator
We didn’t want to build two separate content creation features with rich text editors.
Announcements redesign v3
01
Increase settings readability
There were many announcement settings, so we made sure people understood what each one did.
02
Surface important data up front
Enablers needed key data to tell whether they were reaching the audience they wanted.
06
Commenting & liking
Commenting already existed in several parts of the product (the design system, Planner, and Workspace), but those patterns were inconsistent with each other and didn’t solve every problem our requirements raised. I designed commenting and liking for Channels posts, then refined it in v2 to show differences and updates more clearly.
