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Why Drupal Is Now An Experience Enabling Platform
2
The Online Challenge.....................................................................................3
Experiences Deliver Results.........................................................................4
Delivering Experiences With Drupal............................................................5
Rapid Drupal Engagement —
Acquia Site Factory, Lift, Context DB..........................................................7
Creating Experiences That Deliver Results.............................................10
Case Study: Warner Music.........................................................................12
Conclusion....................................................................................................13
Table of Contents
3
As more and more consumers flock to the
internet to conduct business, it’s no easy task to
build loyalty online. Many companies compete
to sell similar products and services, and
often use comparable language and outreach
tactics. Banks offer commoditized checking,
savings, money markets, stocks, and bonds
products. Similarly, web hosting companies
offer security, uptime, FTP, GIT integration
and reliability. But, which one will you chose?
Often in cases of similar product offerings, it’s
down to how buyers relate to the brand and
the ease of product engagement experience.
Many companies lose sight of this big picture
and often spend huge budgets on deploying
costly and complex technical solutions that
distract energy and resources from refining and
achieving maximum engagement.
The Online Challenge
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4
Brand loyalty in itself is a huge topic but it’s not the
topic of this paper. However, great experiences
combined with brand appeal to a customer’s
emotions to create a seamless connected
engagement process, no matter the
device. The thermostat Nest is a great
example. Nest penetrated a saturated
market by providing an engaging
experience for customers. It helps
manage fuel costs and provides
emotional triggers and reporting to
engage the user. Nest brought a smart
temperature correcting thermostat
to the market, but more than that, they
defined a complete experience: from the
packaging, the ease of install, activation,
registration, all the way to customer support.
This full-lifecycle experience has no doubt
helped Nest to penetrate a saturated market,
dominate, and later sell to Google for $3.2 billion.
Experiences Deliver Results
“Nest brought a ‘smart’ temperature correcting
thermostat to the market, but more than that they
defined a complete experience: from the packaging
to ease of install, activation, registration, all the
way to customer support.”
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5
It’s easy to find other examples out there:
Apple (perhaps no surprise that Nest was
founded by a former Apple VP of product)
continues to create impressive products and
engagement experiences from Genius bars to
iTunes checkout. All of these elements drive
loyalty, engagement, and most importantly,
results. Measuring design or experience is
a difficult task, but a study on experience
design by Adobe suggests companies
with great experiences compared to those
with poor experiences have 14.4% more
repeat customers, 16.6% higher product /
service referral rates, and have 15.8% fewer
customers that are likely to do business with
a competitor.1
“Tomorrow’s market winners should be able to deliver an experience
that is cross channel by design, allowing customers to search, buy and
serve seamlessly across multiple channels and touch points.3”
— Oracle
repeat customers
14.4%
higher product / service referral
rates
16.6%less turnover
rate to a competitor
15.8%
A study on experience design by Adobe suggests companies with great experiences compared to those with poor experiences have:2
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Drupal is so much more than just a content
management system. Drupal continues to evolve
as a leading tool for creating exceptional digital
experiences. This year alone, Gartner has ranked
Acquia (and therefore Drupal by proxy) as a leader
in its magic quadrant for content management
systems. This is down to Acquia’s continued
innovation in products and services that support
the ease of deployment of Drupal solutions.
Drupal is used in a variety of applications from
small websites to massive scale multi-site
enterprise frameworks, applications, and sites.
Delivering Experiences with Drupal
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management4
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The proprietary software vendors are facing
significant challenges as a new way of creating
and measuring experiences consumes market
share. Proprietary software companies speed-
to-market and release cycles are often bound
by a limited output capacity and customer
prioritized feature backlog. However, Drupal,
the largest open source project in the world, is
the poster child for rapid innovation. The global
community of contributors with vast, diverse
skills and innovative ideas, continues to push
Drupal’s modular framework forward rapidly. A
great example of this speed-to-market was the
advent of Pinterest and the module that followed.
When Pinterest first became a big thing in social
communities many of the proprietary software
providers struggled to respond given their
restrictive release cycles. Meanwhile the Drupal
community had developed, tested and released a
Pinterest module within days.
Drupal is also a vastly complex and flexible
application development framework that comes in
a variety of prepackaged distributions for different
industry uses ranging from university, community,
and government to name a few.
“When Pinterest first became a big thing in social communities many
of the proprietary software providers struggled to respond given their
restrictive release cycles. Meanwhile the Drupal community had
developed, tested and released a Pinterest module within days.”
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features
brand
stru
cture
Master Site
structure, etc., can assemble a master site and then
duplicate ad nauseum to deploy brand or product
sites. Each site instance resides on an elastic cloud
SAAS infrastructure to remove the hosting and
maintenance burden. Some example businesses
where this model applies:
• Enterprises managing multiple brands like
pharmaceutical companies can create a site
for each product it produces and each can be
united by one brand, one publishing workflow,
one navigation model, etc.
• Franchises managing multiple stores’ web
properties
• Real estate companies managing multiple
sub-divisions
• Radio or television networks
• Educational institutes with different
departments
• Governments
Acquia offers their Site Factory software as a
service to power some of the biggest brands in
the world on a framework that enables rapid site,
and therefore rapid experience development.
Companies that manage networks of sites with
shared characteristics such as: brand, features,
“With the advent of Site Factory, Lift and Context DB, now marketers can
truly focus on what matters: creating experiences that deliver results.”
Rapid Drupal Engagement — Acquia Site Factory, Lift, Context DB
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A recent Forrester report evaluated the ROI of
using Acquia’s Site Factory for site development
and the results revealed a 944% ROI over 3
years5 based on a composite company with the
following characteristics:
• No centralized process or technology for
website creation and management
• Individual brands used different agencies
with different technologies and processes
• Different CMS’ were peppered throughout
the company to solve different needs
• Time sensitive digital campaigns were core
to the business.
Combine Site Factory with some of Acquia’s
newer products and you have a powerhouse suite
of capabilities. Acquia Lift provides engagement
and personalization capabilities never before
seen with Drupal. Context DB provides the data to
knit together the customer profile, no matter the
device. Drupal is truly an enabler of experience.
With the advent of Site Factory, Lift, and Context
DB marketers can now truly focus on what
matters: creating experiences that deliver results.
Focus on What Matters
Unfortunately, many organizations are held
back from focusing on what matters: attracting,
retaining, and converting customers. Instead,
they’re busy resolving bugs, figuring out how to
build a cost effective scalable infrastructure, and
knitting together disjointed products, tools and
best practices to drive their product forward.
Drupal has evolved to solve these issues and
more. Hosted SAAS and PASS offerings exist that
scale as business requirements and traffic needs
scale. For example; 24/7 support subscriptions
exist to eradicate trouble whenever it surfaces. By
tapping into these services businesses can start
focusing on what matters, and spend more time
building great experiences.
“A recent Forrester report evaluated the ROI of
using Acquia’s Site Factory for site development and
the results revealed a 944% ROI over 3 years.”
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Creating Experiences that Deliver Results
While Drupal and its extended services can
open doors to accelerate experiences, creating
these truly outstanding experiences all comes
down to people and a structured design and
delivery process.
The Right People
When this user experience movement started,
skills were triaged into numerous roles. Someone
researched and reported on the customer. Another
person used that information to create wireframes.
Yet another took those wireframes and applied a
branded visual design.
This separation continued all the way down the line
which resulted in too much communication, loss
of time, and worse, loss of focus on the customer.
Today, in order keep up with the breakneck pace of
the web and competitors, we need to move faster
than triaged roles allow. We need generalists to
tighten the communication and delivery loop. We
need knowledge experts that are on top of market
trends, tools, techniques for testing experience,
and delivering to meet standards.
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The Right Process
Understanding business goals and researching your
market and audience is critical to any experience
project. Structuring an iterative and highly integrated
team means better communication, ability to pivot,
and less waste. Eric Reis brought this idea of a
lean process mainstream with his book, The Lean
Startup, which has taken software development by
storm. To be lean he suggests the following:
• Prioritize what matters most
• Design only what’s necessary to validate, an
MVP as he calls it (Minimum Viable Product)
• Build in small chunks
• Validate with customers
• Repeat
Your project methodology, team experience, and
enabling technology provide the foundations to
deliver exceptional experiences that drive results
for your business. Let’s look at how these elements
come together in a real-life example.
“While Drupal and its extended services can open doors to accelerate
experiences and focus on what matters, getting the right people on
board and following results-driven processes is the key to success.”
People
Tools
Process
12
In 2011, Warner Music had to find a platform that
could not only support long-term growth of their
artists’ websites, but one that could enable a cost
effective and rapid transition from their soon to be
decommissioned platform. They were also dealing
with massive traffic spikes, bugs, and features
requests: all coupled with immovable deadlines tied
to artist’s album release dates. It was a high risk
task with no room for error.
Together, Blink Reaction, Acquia, and Warner,
designed a pixel perfect centralized collection of
artist sites built on Acquia’s Site Factory, in less
than 60 days. First, a master artist site was created
which included all of the features you’d expect to
find on most sites: a blog, upcoming events, and
social linking. Once the artist template was created,
it was rapidly cloned upwards of 75 times, resulting
in 75 sites connected by one brand and one site
structure. After duplicating, each was rapidly
themed to each artist’s liking. 75 sites were not only
migrated from the old platform, but also deployed
on the new platform within an already unrealistic 6
month deadline; something that would be simply
impossible on any other platform or without such
an experienced team. Acquia’s Site Factory also
allowed Warner to focus on experience and their
digital first needs.
How Warner Music removed barriers to achieving results while reducing cost and time-to-market using Acquia Site Factory.
Case Study: Warner Music
“We can stand up as many sites as we want. The way Cloud Site Factory is
structured allows us to scale much faster and it allows us to actually scale
margin. So if we do more, it doesn’t cost us more.”
— VP for digital, broadcast and media company
Recreated and modified 75 major recording artist’s sites on Acquia’s Site Factory platform
75 bespoke websites architected, themed, and migrated on time
Ported news, events, forums, and social data
DESIGNS75
MIGRATIONS75
MONTHS6
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Removing the Barriers to Creating Exceptional Digital Experiences
When it comes to creating digital experiences, it’s
the people, processes, and tools that enable us to
innovate faster. Drupal’s evolved eco-system of
modules and services accelerates development
and helps companies focus on what matters the
most: designing, testing, and iterating experiences
that drive results. Acquia’s products now offer
richer personalization, testing and analysis options
than ever before. Combined with the right process,
Drupal‘s proven platform will allow your organization
to achieve its desired business results.
Credits1. Adobe / Forrester: Best Practices in UX Design
2. Adobe / Forrester: Best Practices in UX Design
3. Oracle: Creating Cross-Channel Unified Experiences
4. Acquia: Acquia Named Leader in 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant
5. Acquia / Forrester: The Total Economic Impact of Acquia Cloud Site Factory
Conclusion
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Jeff Noyes
Director of Digital, Blink Reaction [email protected]
Jeff is a 20 year veteran user experience designer and
thought leader and has lead the design of some of the
largest Drupal digital experiences in the industry.
Niall Fitzpatrick
COO, Blink Reaction [email protected]
Niall heads up strategy, marketing and delivery
operations at Blink Reaction, and has directed some
of the largest Drupal initiatives with some of the top
brands in the industry.
About the Authors
Digital Experiences That Deliver ResultsWe are a global full-service digital agency, specializing in the Drupal platform. You’ll love more than the experience, you’ll love the results.
Give Us a Call: (732) 792–6566195 Rt. 9 South, Ste. 101, Manalapan, NJ 07726
125 Cambridge Park Dr. Ste. 310, Cambridge, MA 02140
