Launching Amplify — Mark Caudell

Background

Creating financial research and analysis for your clients is a specialised skillset and there are only a handful of tools that help you as an Economist or Analyst to create that. Macrobond's flagship product Analysis was used the world over to create charts and analysis ready for publication.

Customer research showed that when it comes to sharing that research with internal teams or external clients, the workflow becomes extremely fragmented and trust dependent. PowerPoint slides, in-house CMSs, webpages, PDFs, emails, etc. all require time and energy to create in a space that is already time critical.

Macrobond Amplify looked to solve for that publication and sharing problem and take the opportunity to create a platform that not only helped tell the story of the research, but add that vital trust layer for those consuming the research. Alongside this, it found a way to extend its footprint beyond existing customers and into the hands of their customers' customers.

Research

Understanding where the friction points were in the customer publication workflow was key to finding out where this product would fit or what would it replace. We conducted a series of interviews with a range of customers from across our persona set with the aim of discovering what was driving this fragmentation.

Synthesising via AI and human validation, the findings revealed the core of the problem lie in no one tool being able to best tell the story the customer was trying to create for their clients. Critically, the theme that come back time and time again, was trust. How can customers ensure their clients trust the substance of their content? This was key and became the linchpin for Amplify. We could use the inherent transparency in the charts economists were creating with Analysis and expose the high-level workings to end clients via interactive variables in their charts. Explorable charts could allow end-clients to understand how the chart was made building trust in the analysis.

We had found the fit for the product and the added value over simple PowerPoint slides.

Mapping UX workflows

Now we knew what we were shooting for, I collaborated with Product on mapping out how Amplify would look like breaking down feature sets into smaller user journeys.

Using Figma, we mapped out how charts would be made interactive within Analysis, how charts would seamlessly get onto the Amplify platform, how we would need to handle private and public research publication, and the how the publisher would want to design and prepare the page the end client would see. All, while hiding as much of the complexity as possible from the publisher to make the process quick and easy - Amplify was becoming a secure CMS with PowerPoint killer intentions.

This part of the project wasn't one that I could just prompt into existence, we were creating something brand new in the market – a true 0-1 new revenue stream.

User journey maps, hand-drawn notes and a Figma board mapping Amplify's features and path to market — Mapping the user journeys, defining the features, path to market, etc.

UI design

Macrobond was going through a rebrand at the same time as I was designing for this new product. This offered up the welcome challenge of not only creating the app designs, aligned with the UX work, but in building a brand new design system as I went.

Ensuring the complexity of the product wasn't pushed upon the user was key when creating the UI. Taking inspiration from the very software environments and UX patterns publishers were familiar with, I created a browser-based app experience with desktop software capabilities.

Amplify publisher tools: a library of charts alongside the asset canvas — Creating an asset

Amplify slide options dialog with interactive chart toggles, title, description and tags — Defining asset settings

The end client view of an Amplify asset: title, description, interactive chart controls and charts — The end client asset

Amplify asset performance dashboard with total views, top themes, top consumers and per-asset engagement tables — Exploring asset performance

Despite the complexity, the UI relies on just a handful of screens to manage, build, and monitor published assets. Much like PowerPoint and Excel, apps customers are experts in, Amplify brings powerful functionality into one space.

Amplify design system boards showing core components and the UI2 component library — Design system

Outcome

Working cross-functionally with Marketing on GTM strategy, Sales and Support on enablement, Finance on pricing, and Engineering on delivery, I brought the first iteration of Amplify to market from nothing. Early sales numbers are positive with a pipeline of £1.5m, and customer feedback has been strong, with the team continuing to iterate.

Amplify represents a new product category for Macrobond – one that creates value not just for existing customers but for the audiences those customers serve.