Media Metrix is comScore’s cornerstone product. It was the company's first product and still accounts for almost half of their revenue.
The product grew through client requests and consequently was built in an ad-hoc manner. This meant it was buggy, difficult and expensive to holistically update, and the UI was outdated.
MediaMetrix was also my first challenge at comScore. The following year when the results for the annual advertising industry survey were released, Media Metrix was recognized as the “Application of Choice” for its ease of use by users.
THE BREAKDOWN
This challenge was a hydra with many heads. Why was the product so buggy? How did people use the product? How did we want them to use it and how could we improve the user experience incrementally without flat out rebuilding the entire product?
The questions lead to many discoveries and changes. We implemented scrum and allocated time to bugs.
I performed user interviews and analysis on report usage. This revealed a gross misalignment between usage perception and reality. We then came up with a couple high-impact, low-cost features. I designed a cross product dashboard which became the #1 ran report. A task-based menu was added. The adoption was immediate with 96% of all reports run in the first month released using the new menu. Also, we did eventually overhaul the product platform, so now it’s easy to enhance.