Ad Trafficking
What is it?
A tool that enables ad trafficking professionals to quickly and easily create flights and set them live.
Spongecell is an Ad Tech company that collaborates with Brands, Media Agencies, and Creative Agencies to serve the right ads to the right people. Their main offering is a Creative Management Platform (CMP) which lets you create and manage your online ad campaigns.
The focus of this project is to update the previous iteration of the ad trafficker to improve efficiently, make it easier to learn, and get it ready for self-service as the platform opens up to other enterprises.
Problem
The existing version was built a long time ago with a simple set of functions, however the list of functions has been greatly expanded on overtime without design input. The cluttered with numerous buttons, resulting in an overwhelming tool that takes months of training to learn. The page loads excruciatingly slow making even the simplest tasks take frustratingly long to complete. That inefficiency is further compounded by the fact that each flight had to be setup individually.
Hypothesis
I believe that by reordering the features in a way that makes sense and only loading a very selective set of data we can reduce the load time tremendously. By adding the ability to have bulk actions and enabling the users to perform an action once and apply it to multiple objects it will greatly increase efficiency.
Sketching
Team brainstorming
As a team we sketched on the boards together, everyone pitches in ideas and we kept what works. The team knows what general direction the designs will go.
I often produce sketches to flesh out the flow and individual components.
The sketches are simple and communicate the concepts effectively, and are a good way to get early feedback from stakeholders.
A quick conversation with product and engineering will ensure that the designs are buildable and gives everyone a chance to provide input.
Iterations
First version focused on improving the performance of the page. Non-trafficking sections of the page has been removed from the top of the page and placed into a side panel so users can still have access to what they need.
This design cleaned up the page, but lacked bulk actions.
In this version, the side panel has been removed and the content appears when you want to add them.
The flow was;
1. Click the +Add Strategies button.
2. Select strategies to add.
3. Select flights you want to add them to.
This allowed for bulk actions, but the bulk action capability is hidden to new users, and the flow is awkward.
For the final version, the multiple flight selection is right up front, bulk action buttons are disabled until at least one Flight has been selected. Through research and testing, we know which actions are most common and put them on the flight level.
By keeping the interface clean, and being smarter about what to show users when, the performance of this page is much better. Along with bulk actions, the users can now perform their tasks much more efficiently. The purpose of the page is also very clear now, making it easy for new users to pick up the tool.