Unified Ads Manager: Value Integrations
Senior UX/UI Designer @ Mediaocean (Current 2021 Project)
Introduction
How I took over our most ambitious project and pushed it into a closed beta.
In 2019, our company realized that our product had reached a crossroad. We were continuously adding feature after feature in an attempt to keep up with our social publisher competitors (Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc). The real challenge was not keeping up with a single one of these social publishers, but all of them at the same time. Our company did not have the resources to outplay all of them. This was a battle we would never win. We had to pivot to sustain success.
What separated us from the social publishers was that our solution was cross-channel. Users could uniquely run and report on all of their ad campaigns, regardless of publisher, in one platform with us. We needed to lean into this, as it was the core of our value.
While our original product was cross-channel, the years of rushing features to market took its toll on the overall usability.
It was time to redesign the product from the ground up. With a focus on user experience, developing it properly from the start, and leaning into our key value-adds, we began designing the Unified Ads Manager.
This project was led by my two senior coworkers as I helped with feedback and collaboration. They did months of research, designed the base framework, and gave me an impressive foundation to start from.
In 2021, I took over this project as the sole UX/UI Designer. We needed to push the product to an open beta, and the main remaining feature was the addition of our Value Integrations.
Smart Group Success Rate
Smart Groups (renamed as Rules in UAM) was a framework to apply automation to campaigns.
Over the past year, only 68% attempts to run a smart group were successful.
Our new framework needed to improve this number drastically.
Research
How I dove into the data and connected with knowledgeable stakeholders to understand the pain points of our current offerings.
My former coworkers had laid the groundwork for the overall research. Months of user interviews, focus groups, shadowing sessions, and usability tests led to the base framework. I assisted with some of these sessions, and the months of absorption allowed me to run with the project when the time came.
Focusing on our Value Integrations, I needed to fully understand how users were managing the Audiences, Creatives, and Rules of their ad campaigns.
These value integrations were available in our original product. I connected with CS, set up client interviews, and dove into the Mixpanel (user analytics tool) data to fully understand our clients’ workflows. I identified pain-points, usability issues, and workflow gaps.
I consolidated this research, and collaborated with each of the PMs for Audiences, Creatives, and Rules. We formed our vision on how the workflows could be improved in the Unified Ads Manager framework.
Design
The core design philosophy was to simplify and establish consistent workflow patterns.
Now that I understood the workflows and issues for Audiences, Creatives, and Rules, it was time to put the reimagined UAM concepts together. Although there were unique requirements for each of the different integrations, I knew they all needed to do the following:
Follow the same workflow across integrations as close as possible, regardless of unique requirements
Allow quick viewing of integrations acting on an entity
Allow bulk application and removal of integrations acting on an entity
The first design covered the requirements, but my gut was telling me the usability was falling short. I reviewed the concept with stakeholders and development, and despite their preference to move forward with this initial design, I insisted on more exploration to maximize the usability.
Initial Rules Integration Concept
Iteration and AB Testing
How I utilized AB testing to ensure we chose the most effective design.
Taking the initial Rules design and applying it to Audiences and Creatives checked off each of the requirements,
but I felt strongly that we could continue improving usability via iteration.
I threw together multiple concepts that I then took to stakeholders. They much preferred the information hierarchy
of the new designs. We were trying to jam too much functionality into the initial versions.
Now we needed to AB test the 2 new approaches and see which one was most effective. I recruited our internal users
of the platform (a great resource for us) to help us make our decision.
Audience Option A
Give more structure to the right rail integration by leveraging a second right rail column.
Audience Option B
Give more structure to the right rail integration by leveraging a top navigation framework.
Validation & Final Design
How I aligned stakeholders to determine our path forward.
The results were clear. Option B had a higher success rate based on the AB tests performed. In addition, the framework saved us valuable horizontal real-estate, a concern that our right rail paradigm already had.
I created functional prototypes of each of the integrations, reviewed the demos and research data with stakeholders, and aligned the team on the best design to move forward with.
Audience Integration Prototype
Conclusion
The iteration of the value integrations is currently being used in our closed-beta by select clients. Next I will be scheduling interviews with these clients to dig into their qualitative feedback on the designs. In addition, I would like to dig further into some of the usability concerns I have with the overall right rail paradigm. Is it taking up too much real estate? Do we need to add resizing functionality so users can see more of the base grid? There is still much to uncover and improve.
Depending on the success of these designs, we are inching closer to a full beta-release of Unified Ads Manager which is a massive milestone for our company.
My key takeaways from this project are:
Barring timeline concerns, never stop trying to improve usability. The first design is never the best, and there is always room to improve.
PMs of each of the different value integrations (Audiences, Creatives, and Rules) all had their initial vision for what it would look like. Being the only person who had direct visibility into all 3, it was paramount that I take each of their inputs into consideration, create designs that satisfy the requirements, and get them all aligned on the direction, backed by tangible evidence.
This was my first project in Figma (previously we used Sketch). I was tasked with exploring the tool and I came away extremely impressed. The collaboration features within Figma made communication on designs much easier, specs were much less time consuming, and prototyping was a breeze. I am currently pushing to make Figma the standard design tool across Mediaocean.
I am thankful for my coworkers before me who created a great framework for the Unified Ads Manager. In addition, their research documentation was essential to the success of this project.