In early 2018, Mixpanel decided to focus in on selling to marketing departments, and wanted to establish themselves as the thought leader in the space. What better way, than for the content team to arrange exclusive interviews with enterprise CMOs and startup leaders. These interviews sought to highlight the messy, behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating exceptional customer experiences, and the challenges–and victories–that still lay ahead. They wanted to emphasize how data plays a key role in all of this.
Getting involved early in the project was crucial. A big part of why we were able to get elite marketing leaders to sit down for interviews was by sharing our vision for the whole project. I was responsible for pushing a central hub experience for people to keep coming back to as we got new interviews. Because we decided to go that route, the scope of this project was to think through a design system that could easily be updated in the CMS for our marketers. I designed the pages and helped art direct several awesome illustrations in this ongoing project.
These are the core screens of the Data & the Modern CMO report. We needed easily editable and infinitely addable interview pages that could be shared across networks. And of course we needed a place to put them all. I worked with the lead content writer on the project to understand the categories to build a flow that would allow readers to find the specific topics they were most interested in as easily as possible.
We worked with an illustrator to concept out a style that revolved around the floating icons used throughout the pages. I wanted to test out a new font pairing so as to distinguish this page from Mixpanel's main site. We used the gradient to give it a “Mixpanel presents…” feel, but given that many of the interviewees were not Mixpanel customers, we wanted to give it a more distinct feel from main site than other pieces of content.
Tweetable quotes are an important aspect of these pages and were crucial in moving the user around the page. The floating, parallaxing elements are designed to break up the space on particularly long articles with minimal assets. We tested a couple different placements for the orange body of introduction text, and found that moving it down the page and getting directly into the article led to the highest engagement.