Marketo Engage: New Year, New UI

In the years since Marketo's acquisition, there has been little sign of Adobe's presence in the Marketo platform itself. Several Adobe integrations have been released to varying degrees of publicity, but their adoption has been limited. That is now changing. Last quarter, Adobe finally started the roll-out of the Marketo Next-Generation User Experience. This new UI combines the much hyped Marketo Sky Beta UX with the broader Adobe Experience Cloud look and feel. Sky never saw wide adoption because the benefits of the new experience never outweighed the training costs of learning a new user interface. It's a common problem for new UIs, and the reason successful UI changes are always mandatory despite the significant user backlash this generates. If you give people a choice, they'd rather stick with the workflow they know unless the benefits of the new approach are overwhelming. Salesforce suffered from the same problem during their transition to lightning, and eventually forced their customers to migrate despite initially not wanting to do so.

One significant barrier to adoption with the new Marketo UX has caused considerable push back from the user community: drag and drop in the folder tree. This is an essential feature missing from the new UX. An enhanced move capability is being touted as an alternative but isn't quite making the grade for users. The folder tree is a common UX paradigm across the entire Adobe product portfolio, but none of these other apps rely on drag and drop in quite the same way that Marketo does. In Marketo, it's the only way to keep assets organised in programs, and without it, the entire folder structure quickly descends into unmanageable chaos. Platforms such as AEM and Adobe Analytics don't need drag and drop as much, because of the nature of those applications. In Marketo they do. Adobe are committed to adding drag and drop capabilities back into Marketo in the next few months, but have decided to proceed with the roll-out of the new user experience without it. That's a mistake in my view, but not a major one.

There are substantial benefits to the new UI. The replacement of the global menu with a top navigation modelled on other Adobe applications is an obvious one. Many of the Marketo Sky exclusive new features will be added to the new UX, bringing them to the wider audience of Marketo Classic users for the first time. This includes Smart Campaign priority, mass select on the asset screens and folder tree filters. A much improved global search is a welcome addition too. The enhanced search capability includes the ability to search design studio and marketing activities simultaneously, as well as the option to filter search results.

The core Marketo product screens are being updated to a layout and design much closer to Sky than the existing Marketo UI. This is not a reskin of Sky though. As such, many of the existing options are more prominent rather than being hidden in overview or setup screens. As with any UI change, there will be a period of adjustment, particularly given the new tree and top navigation cannot be disabled. It will be possible to toggle between the new and existing program and asset screens though, as and when they're rolled out. The roll-out is a gradual one, with instances and individual product screens being updated at different times. Many Marketo users will have the new tree already, with enterprise customers that use workspaces seeing the update after the forthcoming January release.

URL Changes

One side effect of the new UI is that Marketo application URLs are changing. Much as with Sky, they no longer show your pod. Instead, they only show your Munchkin ID. The asset id will continue to be displayed. This URL change will soon be extended to cover public vanity URLs for landing pages, file and images in instances that don't use branded domains. This could affect prospects and customers visiting Marketo landing pages or filling in Marketo forms. From April, any URLs for forms, landing pages or images loaded over marketo.com domains will be changing to instance specific URLs (e.g. the default domain of files hosted in Marketo will change from app-sj01.marketo.com to 123-ABC-456.mktoweb.com). Assets, files and images served over customer branded domains aren't affected. For landing pages, this only impacts the small percentage of Marketo customers that haven't configured a landing page domain in their instance. For forms, files and images, this could affect many more customers, as Marketo occasionally uses the default domain where SSL is required. After the April release, it will be worth checking websites and external landing pages for any references to Marketo domains and updating them as needed. The existing Marketo branded URLs will continue to work for a year after the change goes live, so there is time.

Forms 1.0

Occurring much sooner is the deprecation of Marketo Forms 1.0. This is the old forms editor replaced in 2014. The ability to create or edit forms in the 1.0 editor was removed years ago. However, any live forms created in Marketo Forms 1.0 will stop working in May 2021. Anyone whose Marketo instance was provisioned before 2014 should double-check that all their active forms were created using the current Forms 2.0 editor.

This update also affects newer Marketo customers, who create custom form layouts for Marketo forms rather than using the Marketo form embed code. The ability to post non-Marketo forms to the Marketo Form Endpoints is being disabled, in order to protect against bot attacks and phishing scams. Such behaviour has never been supported, but developers have sometimes used this approach for complex web forms anyway. A new forms API is being released in January that allows non-Marketo forms to be posted to Marketo. Marketo customers who post non-Marketo forms to Marketo should check their integrations use a supported method such as the new API or the existing push API. Customers using the Marketo form embed code are not affected by this change unless those forms were created in Forms 1.0 before 2014.

Change Management

Finally, anyone using MSI in Salesforce should check that they've got the latest version installed. A security update means that old versions of MSI will stop working next week.

There are clear reasons for all these updates, and they will benefit the Marketo platform in the long-term. However, any change is disruptive in the short-term. These are significant milestones for Marketo and their customers, but the biggest of all may be overlooked by users. The new UI includes the oft-ignored Marketo Engage product name in the application for the first time. There's no indication that the Marketo brand is going away, but don't be shocked if it does happen eventually.