Foundry Platform Experience Revamp
This case study narrates the story of the redesign of Monotype's foundry platform and explains why it was required. In addition, I've provided an example of a foundry dashboard including problems, the design process, and some significant conclusions. This resulted in significantly more foundry signups. As of September 2023 (1,211 active users), monthly traffic on foundry dashboard shot up by 88.5% compared to April 2023 (168 active users).
What is foundry platform?
Foundry Platform is Monotype’s self-service (b2b) platform that allows foundries to manage their fonts and sales. It provides foundries with a variety of tools and features to help them manage their font libraries, submit new fonts, create bundles and create promotions. It provides a centralized location for foundries to store their fonts and track their sales and performance. Their fonts are eventually sold on Monotype’s b2c business, myfonts.com. Why redesign is needed? I’ll let you know shortly
My contributions
When I joined Monotype, Foundry Platform was already existing for 5 years. At this stage, my main project goals were to simplify the website as much as possible, make it more intuitive for the user, as well as improve the visual appearance of the entire interface. The most important part was to design an overall friendlier UI for the foundries accessible across all devices and to understand user research findings and iterate designs based on the data and feedback to deliver user flows, high-fidelity screens, and visual assets to support the product development process
The users
The graph below illustrates the segmentation of Foundry Platform users into various groups for your understanding. The majority of users were classified as freelancers and small business owners.
The users - foundry personas
Siti the Freelancer
Siti is a freelance graphic designer or recent student. She decided to make a font based on some work she did for a client, or made a font because she couldn’t find the font she needed for a project online. She’s selling her font(s) to see if she can make some passive income.
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Earns $0-$1k per year
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CoolFonts the Startup
CoolFonts is releasing fonts that are really resonating with customers, and they’re focused on making excellent imagery and marketing content. The foundry is growing, but they want to take it to the next level.
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Earns $100-$200k per year
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Sam the Archivist
Sam has an older library of fonts that he doesn’t actively market or merchandise, but sees steady sales online. Sam is happy to collect monthly checks, but doesn’t want to do much to maintain or grow his library.
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Earns $1k-$100k per year
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TopDesign the Powerhouse
A top foundry with excellent fonts; the brand is extremely important to the success of their business. TopDesign fonts are desirable to many global brands and this foundry wants to reach even more top customers.
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Earns $200k+ per year
Vicki the Small
Business Owner
Vicki runs a small business making and selling fonts. Her foundry grew and was successful in the past, but her business has been flat or declining in recent years, despite occasionally releasing new fonts. She isn’t sure why her foundry has been declining but wants to grow her business.
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Earns $1-$100k per year
Why redesign of the platform is needed? - Problems
Foundry Platform, has no competitors and hence it has been able to sustain itself to date without any design or research effort. Therefore earlier, a high level of research and usability tests were never needed. The UX team took the initiative to call out that design and research are crucial parts of any product's success and business growth (regardless of having no competitors). It was necessary to fully understand the user's pain points and determine whether this effort will bring value to the business.
When I joined the Monotype’s UX team, the majority of research, user surveys, and user interviews with the foundries were already conducted by Mary Cathrine Pflug (I personally could not have the chance to do my own research). 3 major problems identified with the website were:
01
Cluttered UI
The interface is too cluttered and difficult to navigate and not always intuitive. This makes it difficult for foundries to manage their fonts and sales effectively.
"Finding accounts was challenging, but after looking around the website I discovered it was a sub-nav under payments”
02
Poor product perception
The colors, imagery, copywriting and over all entire interface do not speak for Monotype’s brand. They lack in consistent emotional branding and a clear strategy.
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“this looks like an MVP” - this is a really strong statement when the product is at full and final state.
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“We often visit websites like Behance, Pinterest, Dribbble, and other creative platforms, however we feel Foundry Platform to be lacking in comparison.”
03
Inconsistent experience
Inconsistent design breaks the user experience and increases technical debt. Users are most likely get lost in the website and frustrated over small nuances.
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“date selection in earnings reports page is harder than the same date selection in enterprise.monotype” - there is no consistency in the experience between enterprise.monotype and foundry platform.
Why redesign is needed? - Business Goals
01
More foundries sign ups
The more foundries that are part of the platform, the more fonts customers will have to choose from. This can make the platform more attractive to customers, and can lead to increased sales. As a leading provider of fonts, Monotype can use the diversity of fonts on its platform to demonstrate its commitment to quality and innovation. This can help to attract new customers and partners, and can also help to solidify Monotype's position as a leader in the font industry.
02
Scale the business to enterprise.monotype
The foundry platform currently supports sales on myfonts. Now we also want to increase the font library of monotypefonts as well. This will give foundries more flexibility to track their performance on monotypefonts.
 It was also recommended by the foundries as the topmost feature that are most important to them.
03
Improved brand reputation
The redesign could make Monotype's Foundry Platform a more modern and attractive platform. This could improve Monotype's brand reputation and could help to attract both new customers and new foundries
Design goals
01
A delightful, consistent consumer experience
To ensure a proper design system is in place to reduce technical debt, and give our consumers a better, consistent experience. To work with engineering and product teams to solve for user’s problems and achieve business goals
02
Strengthen the value proposition of foundry platform
We want to highlight our core product offerings that go beyond font management. We aim to offer more personalization, enable tracking of sales on both myfonts and monotypefonts and a space for educational materials to help foundries learn how to expand their businesses.
03
Operational efficiency
The idea is to create resusable design components that can be utilised for both MyFonts and Monotypefonts in order to streamline internal development processes. The revamp of MyFonts (b2c) and enterprise.momotype (b2c) is yet to happen, which will ensure consistency in the design system utilised across all platforms. Responsiveness and optimisation in all the devices is equally important.
Now, lets's take an example of
Foundry Dashboard
Current dashboard
The current dashboard basically, is used to upload fonts/families and manage submissions. Other than font management, it has no other purpose. A user lands on this screen first, after login/signup.
Need for more performance tracking, data insights,
personalisation and space for educational content
We found out that one of the main features that the foundries need is having access to advanced charts/graphs and data showing font performance insights. 71% of the users marked it as extremely important in the user survey.
There’s a need for receiving content from monotype to learn about how to grow their business. 63% of the users marked it as extremely important.
Problem statement
The current dashboard basically, is used to upload fonts/families and manage submissions. Other than font submission, it has no other purpose. A user lands on this screen first, after login/signup.
Intent of creating consistency with Antiqua design system
For a project to revamp monotype fonts (which is also called Monotype One initiative), the UX team had already created 70% of a better design system called DLS 2.0 or Antiqua before I joined. So, for a quicker design process, it was simpler for me to plug and play with the new components from Antiqua.
No more font management on dashboard
Our UX team's work on a new navigational structure as part of the Monotype One initiative (revamp of enterprise.monotype). It was one of the earliest and most significant modifications they made. In order to create uniformity in the structure across all platforms, we used the same component and plugged it into foundry platform.
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It was intended for font submission and font management to be a separate function, hence a separate tab in the left navigation was required. As a result, underneath dashboard, a separate tab for "fonts and bundles" was created.
Navigation in redesigned monotypefonts
Navigation in redesigned foundry platfrom
The new navigation structure is highly scalable and allows the addition of any number of navigational elements.
Typical user behaviour and journey for dashboard in any
b2b platfrom
A B2B platform dashboard is a visual representation of key performance indicators (KPIs) that help businesses track and measure the performance of their marketing, sales, and customer success efforts. The typical function of a B2B platform dashboard is to provide users with a single point of view for monitoring their customer journey. The user journey for a B2B platform dashboard typically follows this pattern:
Source: Leardsquared
Early ideation - collecting good references
I couldn’t perform a formal competitive analysis because foundry platform has literally no competitors and hence no relatable references for font management dashboard is available on the internet. Therefore, to get an idea and get started in the UI design, I
took a lot of snapshots and references from websites like hubspot’s dashboard, dribble, pinterest, etc and hence created a moodboard for myself.
4 design laws for getting started
On a separate session, I and my manager established 4 design principles for the landing page to make sure we design based on these principles. These principles are centred around foundries and their needs.
Proximity
Elements that are close together are perceived as being related. This can be used to group related data together on a dashboard, making it easier for users to find the information they need.
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“Performance of fonts, families and bundles can be grouped together”
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“Maybe data of earnings reports being grouped together?”
Emphasis
A dashboard should have a focal point, which is the element that users will first notice. This can be achieved by using contrast, size, or color to emphasize the focal point.
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“Maybe performance of fonts, families and bundles can be grouped together?”
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Closure
The human eye will try to complete incomplete figures. This can be used to create visual interest on a dashboard, and to make it easier for users to understand the information that is being presented.
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“Content hidden from the users who haven’t signed the latest agreement”
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Contrast
Elements that contrast with each other are more noticeable. This can be used to highlight important information on a dashboard, making it easier for users to see what's important.
Low fidelity explorations - quick sketches
We started sketching some crazy ideas in our minds. Our focus at this stage was to diverge first, and converge later.
Final solution
Along with the redesign process, we also changed the visual identity of our whole product with the new style guides and principles with the help of our new design system, Antiqua. My manager advised me to start experimenting and playing with the UI Design while keeping the design guidelines and principles in mind because we already had a lot of components created.​
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There were 4 main edge cases for the dashboard that needed to be addressed while designing:
01
Existing users
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Users who wants to view consolidated data of multiple foundries
02
New users
03
Users who have not signed the latest agreement
There are other nuances as well like dropdowns, date selection, mobile and tablet views, etc. Here I'll cover the main screens of existing users and new users. Rest I can discuss over call :)
Final solution - existing users
For existing users, the dashboard will show earnings and orders reports; top-performing fonts, families and bundles; and promotions as core data insights that can be changed as per the user's choice of date.
There are some cases where a user is part of some agency that supports various foundries. So those users might have access to multiple foundries. Hence, in those cases, a user can see consolidated or individual data for the foundries they have access.
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There's also a case where a user has registered but not uploaded the fonts yet, and similarly many other edge cases like this. As I mentioned earlier, I can discuss all these small nuances over call.
Final solution - new users
For new users, who have just signed up, the dashboard will first greet them with a big welcome note and elegant graphic. Next, it will encourage them to complete their profile and upload their first font/family. Everything else like articles/videos and the personalization section will remain the same as existing users.
Results and impact
Recently, through communication with my team members, I learned about the success of the new dashboard from the UX researcher:
Overall the redesign initiative resulted in significantly more foundry signups. As of September 2023 (1,211 users), monthly traffic on foundry dashboard shot up by 88.5% compared to April 2023 (168 users).
In the news
This revamp was published on designweek UK. You can read more about this project in the article below:
https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/28-august-1-september-2023/monotype-foundry-program/
