Opticon London: A new flow

A few weeks ago, myself and Sam Buss headed up to London to attend this year's annual Optimizely conference; Opticon, to find out what’s new and how Optimizely is set to develop in the coming months.

“A Creative Director, at a tech conference,” I hear you gasp, indeed I’m probably not the usual candidate to attend a conference like Opticon but I was made to feel immediately welcome by the title of the day; The Intersection of Art and Science.

Unfortunately, that was pretty much the last true art reference of the day as far as I could see, that said, there was still plenty to pique my interest.

I suspect the reference to the intersection referred more to content and technology, but for me, this was the key to the day. The second speaker of the day; Rupali Jain, Optimizely’s Chief Product Officer, spoke about flow, and cutting to the chase of the talk, specifically workflow.

Optimizely have over recent years focussed on building a suite of technologies to allow marketing departments to operate content management, experimentation, analytics, e-crm and more from within the Optimizely family of technologies. However, they had until now still been quite disparate. Now branded as “Optimizely One” the focus is clearly not on just having the full range of tech, but bringing them into one, more cohesive, eco-system.

The usability of Optimizely hasn’t always been seen as its strongest point, but it was obvious from Rupali’s talk that over the coming years, usability of the platform is going to be right at the top of the development priority list.

Primarily what this means for Optimizely is that they are now integrating how and where you can operate these functions. So users can create new experiments for the platform from within the marketing platform, whilst at the same time reviewing and adjusting the email newsletter, viewing campaign schedules, and approving work (globally if required) without logging in and out, or jumping between windows. A simple and seamless way to manage all your marketing activity within one browser window.

Or that at least is the vision; some of this has been actioned and some of it is on the roadmap, but as a Creative Director, this is where I started to get excited. Firstly, for anyone who extols the values of user-centered design I would say that, it's essential the term “user” doesn’t solely focus on the end user but also understands the importance of the system user.

This, in turn, brings me to the second reason I can see real value in this user centric approach to Optimizely One. Given we also produce marketing campaigns as well as build digital platforms, we create campaigns, propositions and strategies that require a huge degree of alignment. We often see on /off-messaging or inconsistent coms go out once the campaign is live as different departments or offices roll out the campaign. The power of Optimizely means this is all brought together in terms of asset management, approval, and scheduling coupled with the other tools such as experimentation, so it really does start to enable the idea of fully integrated and well-managed campaigns that help our clients deliver on the original vision we shared.