Crafted - RIO - Optimizing the workflow between creative agency and client

Think - Create

A digital platform for managing the entire production cycle of ADV campaigns from their first concept to go-live.

Services

User Research
UI Design
Product Design
Experience Mapping
Design System
Areas

Communication

We helped Crafted design Rio, a platform for optimizing the creation and management of digital campaigns, connecting agency and client.

Rio is a product that didn’t exist, a tool shared by both the agency’s people, such as accounts, designers, creative director, and developers, and the client’s team, such as project managers and marketing director.

With Rio, users can share and approve campaign masters, define approval processes inside and outside the agency, and manage and monitor the entire campaign production up to its launch.

About Crafted

Crafted is a digital communication agency, born in 2021 from an idea of Silvio Meazza, an entrepreneur and publicist who chose Venice as the heart and headquarters of this creative hub.
Growing rapidly in a few years, today Crafted has about fifty people, with whom it supports Italian and international companies in the creation of digital projects with a strongly innovative character.

Exploring experiences and processes

As a first step, we explored and mapped the experiences and processes through which Crafted people manage the conception and production of their campaigns.

In this phase, it was crucial to represent the touch points between the different players in the agency and the client. Each moment was explored in depth through interviews and workshops, with the aim of bringing out paint points and opportunities for improvement.

This initial research activity was synthesized into a unique customer journey map, in which the different users and their journeys and interactions were represented along a timeline that followed the macro-phases of a campaign life cycle step by step.

Designing the interface by validating step by step with users

Subsequently, we hypothesized initial interface solutions with wireframes and then narrated and tested them with a group of Crafted team members. From this first test, a number of insights emerged, which led us to sharply change some journeys. Especially, from the first validation sessions, it was clear that the Crafted designers, needed to load a lot of artifacts in a short time and in an easy and natural way. This led us to revise the creativity upload journey by envisioning copy-paste based bulk features, through which designers simply had to copy and paste Excel tabular rows to generate within Rio the corresponding banner formats.

The challenge of the approval process

The biggest challenge for our designers was to define the approval process for the different formats. In Rio, in fact, each creative could become the subject of approval by one or more people, internal or external to the agency, defined and monitored by accounts.
Establishing the logic and variables of this process and translating them into experiences that were as simple as they were effective was one of the points on which we invested the highest effort.

Visual Identity

In parallel with the creation of wireframes, we were responsible for translating Crafted’s visual brand identity into the visual identity of Rio’s interface. This resulted in a minimalist style, supported by a series of purpose-built illustrations and icons, in which the creatives of the different campaigns play the leading role.

Testing the MVP

For the development of the MVP we worked in parallel with the development team, coding the graphic elements and components in a dedicated design system.

After releasing the first MVP, we organized the first Rio Day together with Crafted to analyze the solution through a user testing session with people from Crafted and one of their client companies. The user testing confirmed early hypotheses and allowed us to collect a number of feedbacks, which were integrated into the product backlog.

Now Rio is ready to be used in a pilot project, a first real stress-test from which we can build on the adoption of this new tool in Crafted’s most important projects.