TUNE’s New Offer Experience: How Customer Feedback Guides Product Form 

Good product design represents more than just a slick interface. The experience should meet the needs of its users through well-placed information (hierarchy) and logical workflows. In the end, users should be able to complete their tasks without much thought about the software itself. In the best-case scenario, good product design might even provide a bit of delight. 

A Need for Modern Patterns 

TUNE has served the world of affiliate marketing for a long time. While the platform has grown over the years to meet the needs of an ever-changing industry, as of late, there’s been a desire both internally and from our customers to rethink the experience to meet current trends and expectations. In short, some of TUNE’s key workflows were starting to feel a little dated.  

With customer feedback in hand, we presented an opportunity to improve the current TUNE toolset. The goal was to improve day-to-day quality of life for our customers that spend a lot of time within TUNE, tweaking their affiliate programs to be as optimized as possible. We focused on introducing familiar patterns. This included interactions that are familiar when using any modern web application. It also included organizing information by providing a simple structure to better help new users find their way through the platform quicker.  

Starting with Offer Management 

TUNE is a robust and often complex web application with dozens of different workflows. Gone are the days of the early web where entire application redesigns happened in a short time span and without much input, if any, from users. Today, product design works together with software engineering and business stakeholders to target key areas of improvement and show value in the investment.

For TUNE, we landed on tackling the offer management flow first. It’s the core of the platform that touches almost every other area of the application. We felt the potential value in rethinking this area first would help us gain buy-in to tackle other key areas later.  

The result is a modern version of offer management that introduces strong hierarchy and modern UI patterns.

One of the key use cases we had in mind was new customers onboarding to TUNE for the first time. The old offer experience was the equivalent of that catch-all drawer that everyone has in their kitchen. There are lots of fantastic tools to solve just about any problem, but finding the tool you’re looking for always takes some effort, especially if you’re coming to that drawer for the first time. In many ways, we applied the equivalent of drawer organizers to the TUNE offer experience.  

In the screenshot above, you can see the random placement of tools in the old experience and the introduction of a tab system in the new experience to better help users more quickly locate the right tool for the specific task they’re trying to accomplish.  

In this example, you can see the difference between unfamiliar patterns required to approve partners in the old experience with a more modern and familiar pattern that users might find on any other modern web application.  

Continuing to Refine 

We’ve taken an iterative approach to rolling out the new experience to our customers. We invited a core group to provide initial feedback and based on that feedback we improved the issues that they struggled with. Over time, we continued that pattern of opening the new experience up to various groups, collected more feedback, and continued to improve.

Today, we’re happy to report that the new offer experience is enabled for 99% of our customer base. We continue to improve those last few challenges surfaced by some of our most prolific power users.  

Looking Ahead 

With the new offer experience in front of users, we’re looking at the next area of TUNE to improve upon. In fact, you can take a look at the user management area of TUNE to see a similar update, making it easier to discern permissions across users and add new users to the platform. 

We’re always looking for additional feedback from our customers. If you have suggestions for improvement, please don’t hesitate to share them with us through the Feedback portal or by emailing [email protected].