Altria maintains a robust portfolio of brands, and they were seeking greater operational agility to deliver programs to market more efficiently, while championing best-in-class digital experiences that seamlessly and personally connect with their consumers.
Digital Transformation
Altria’s vision for revamping their ecosystem to deliver relevant and personalized experiences to their consumers involved much more than modernizing their tech stack. It required a new perspective on business strategy, adoption of new processes, and a dedicated effort to persuade people to work in new ways. As core strategic partners, our agency kicked off this transformation with discovery, where I played a key role in surveying our stakeholders and distilling feedback into key themes. Once we aligned on priorities, I drafted an experience framework that looked beyond our core design activities and took a broader view across all channels our consumers interact with. We knew that standard agency timelines didn’t align with a desire for greater agility, so I worked with our operations team to begin shifting our design and development processes towards a product design model.
A New Design Approach
A major part of Altria’s evolution was a platform migration of all their digital properties to Adobe Experience Manager. This included roughly a dozen branded websites that previously had no shared interaction or visual standards. Our shift to a lean product design workflow was critical to successfully rebuilding the whole portfolio in a sensible timeframe. I managed a UX and visual design team through the migration, working in lockstep with our build and client partners. We moved to component-based design system, and in addition to shaping our documentation process for UI specifications, style guides and design toolkits, I stood up and organized a robust pattern library, training agency and client teams how to work in this new system. The evolution is never done, and I also helped create a governance system for identifying the need for new or enhanced products. Adapting our creative team to shifting their ways of working took patience and persistence, and I advocated to reshape responsibilities to bring on dedicated product design and design-ops roles.
Evolving Marlboro
During the time that we were migrating the full Altria portfolio, key areas of the Marlboro website were also being reimagined. I developed Marlboro’s experience principles to guide the design process, building from the overarching Altria experience framework. The evolution of Marlboro also included a pilot for a rewards platform, and I helped guide the “north star” prototype, defining the key task flows that we’d test in a multi-city round of usability reviews. I collaborated with the visual design team and built a high-fidelity prototype that included logic to reflect point earn and burn interactions.
Altria 'Next Gen' was a penultimate project that topped off ten years spent working on this robust portfolio of brands. I've touched an incredibly broad and complex range of work with Altria, from concepting promotions and designing community features to breaking down registration barriers and launching new product sites. I've moved across the strategy and design spectrum, from evangalizing emphathy mapping to educating on the finer points of responsive design. While my methods are flexible and adaptive, I've never compromised on focusing on the consumer at the center of these brands.
