This is a guest post by Vanessa Bugasch, SVP of Global Marketing & Product Marketing, Business Development at Cision.
Ever have someone call your baby ugly? Probably not to your face, but when you’re a Product Marketing person you actually want to hear when someone thinks your product is ugly because you can do something to fix it.
This past weekend we launched a new release of CisionPoint, and of the dozen or so releases we’ve had of the product since its launch, this is by far the most significant change to the product we’ve had.
I helped launch our first release of CisionPoint back in 2007, and was very proud of our initial release and all the new features and functionality we have added since then. CisionPoint is now in 8 languages, with users in 20+ countries and is closing in on the 30,000 user mark. However, in the past 6 months we came to realize that while all the new functionality we keep adding is great, we hadn’t done much to update our user interface to make it simpler and easier to use.
Basically people were beginning to call my baby ugly.
So to boil it down in a nutshell, this latest release is really about three things:
- Making CisionPoint simpler and easier to use
- Making CisionPoint more social
- Making CisionPoint faster
We talked to a large number of users, incorporated industry best practices and made some significant investments in new technology to make all three of those things happen, and I’m very excited to get people’s reaction.
By no means are we done in improving our interface, but we focused on the main areas of our application first– the home page, our Smart Search and our listing pages – and redesigned them. We added new functionality to better incorporate Twitter and RSS feeds into the application, and we completely redesigned our wizard to help users distribute news to social and traditional wire channels. And probably most significant, we re-architected our application so that pages load faster, searches run more efficiently and results return quicker.
So if you haven’t met my baby, I’d love to introduce you to her. She turned three this past September, she recently was named a CODiE finalist for Best Marketing/PR Solution and she just had a makeover. And if you’ve already been hanging out with my baby, I’d love to get your feedback on what we can do next to help improve your experience.
