Context
Help advertisers attribute and measure campaign success to specific items. However, existing interface lacked guidance, was not actionable, did not scale well and had serious usability issues.
Action
I worked with the product and engineering team to identify the needs and designed an end-to-end, scalable, intuitive and automated experience to help advertisers make quicker decisions with confidence.
Outcome
Retail campaign experience became efficient and actionable with a guided experience leading to new business opportunities ( 6 key large format retailers onboarded within 3 months).
Business Requirement
Retail focused programmatic ad campaigns help advertisers target the right audience, at the right time, at the right place and attribute campaign performance to the corresponding products. I designed end-to-end experience of product centric advertising campaign workflow to improve scalability, productivity and decisioning for better data-driven outcomes.
Creating a targeted campaign is a complex process and the advertiser may be required to do the following:
Have campaign strategy with objectives and KPIs
Generate itemset by selecting SKUs from the catalog
Identify target audience, publisher, creatives etc. for
Refine the selection to achieve optimal mix
This requires the advertiser to consider a multitude of factors such as the target audience, publishers and creatives. This can often be an exhausting and tedious process leaving advertisers anxious with limited understanding, visibility of underlying process and insights into potential campaign performance.
By guiding advertisers through the workflow backed by contextual and actionable insights, we could take away the guess work and bring intelligence and efficiency to decision making process.
Problem Scenario
Advertisers wanted to use large inventory lists for campaign attribution which was not feasible due to interface and architecture limitations
Retail focused programmatic ad campaigns help advertisers target the right audience, at the right time, at the right place and attribute campaign performance to the corresponding products. I designed end-to-end experience of product centric advertising campaign workflow to improve scalability, productivity and decisioning for better data-driven outcomes.
I conducted heuristic evaluation and gathered user needs and business requirements to understand potential blockers to user success. I further organized a workshop with stakeholders and development team to define the future state and conducted gap analysis to identify potential gaps and opportunities.
This led to a shared future vision and it became clear that we should be leveraging data for actionable insights, integrating workflows and automating certain tasks for an improved experience.
We wanted to onboard big box retailers with millions of SKUs in their inventory. The earlier interace was build as a one-off solution that could not handle the scale to manage item search, selection and management process. I performed cognitive walkthrough and conducted heuristics evaluation to identify the issues and potential areas of intervetion across the user flow.
I then worked with Product manager to translate user insights and future vision into value proposition and defined product features. I further visualized future vision into a journey map. This helped the team to successfully navigate the problem space and identify solutions with an eye at the future. We ended up focusing on the features that would help users make aster and better decisions when setting up campaigns.
Key Features
Build custom itemset from scratch using advanced semantic and faceted search and dynamic selection.
Presets & Wizards
Autogenerate itemsets with one-click or use semi-automated step by step wizard for granular control.
Inventory Insights
Emerging trends and insights about brands, products or categories to fine tune campaign strategy.
Once features were finalized, I created detailed content structure, user flows and wireframes. I explored various schemas and did quick validation to identify the best possible solution. I further worked with data scientists and engineers to address technical constraints and shaped the design till it was ready for handoff.
Problem Scenario
I reimagined entire workflow having a guided experience using probabilistic and deterministic data for automated and simplified experience
I applied cognitive science, behavioural design and user psychology principles to design the layout and interactions. Focus was to guide the user by giving them right insight supported by right amount of information to take the next best action. I carefully orchestrated data, content and interactions to deliver actionable insights for next best action. I worked closely with stakeholders to ensure there is a right balance between optimizing campaign spend and campaign spend with respect to its reach and ROAS (return on Ad spend).
I further simplified the interface and used patterns such as faceted smart search, bulk actions and card layout to reduce cognitive friction, increase intuitiveness and improve efficiency. I ensured that we use modular reusable components to make the interface scalable and customizable to incorporate emerging needs.
Subsequently, I worked with developers to implement product features as part of roadmap. With inputs from business stakeholders, I worked with Product manager to prioritize and distribute the features over incremental releases. Based on early signals, this feature
Unblocked millions in revenue by making data accessible to advertisers
Onboarded multiple big box merchants with inventory over few million SKUs each
Reduced cognitive errors and improved productivity
Increased adoption of data features to improve strategic decisioning