Grab Marketing Manager
as Lead Designer at Obvious, remote 2021-22
Things I did..
Delivered MVP Self Serve Ads platform to fasten the process of creating and managing marketing campaigns. This initiative reduced the workload on the internal operational team, increased the customer base and Ad revenue by making campaign management available in one platform and directly to advertisers.
I led a team of 3 designers for a course of 10 months and delivered 5 core features. We developed the Version 1 as well as future directions for the platform.
Project management
Stakeholder management
Delivering features
Leading research
Supporting & mentoring
Some stuff I worked on..
Driving product direction
Through discussions I facilitated anchoring on user goals, wireframes and flow charts, I was able to identify the requirements from the team and align on concepts.
This process allowed design to influence product direction as we engaged the stakeholders in unpacking goals and challenges along with concept reviews.
We aligned on developing two experiences for two user persona, Novice & Advance since the need of these users were significantly different. My team focused on the Advance or the ‘Pro’ experience for web going forward, as a version of Novice experience already existed for mobile.
Facilitating knowledge transfer
To understand the complex requirements of campaign management steps, I leveraged flow charts and wireframes to co-create with Product team. These jam sessions led to aligned information architecture and user journey of the platform.
This process was further adopted by my team for their subsequent features.
Anchoring user in multi-step process
It was important to anchor the user to the step in the process as well as uniquely identify the campaign they were creating or editing. Here I utilised dynamic headers and steppers for the user to constantly have context.
A challenging form design project which became a learning in information hierarchy, cognitive load and progressive disclosure. It also made me conscious of a UI component’s right usage.
Uncomplicating targeting
This is one of those complex features as every targeting had its own parameter and some were mandatory while some where not.
Here I abstracted a structure that could be followed across all targeting 1) Targeting type (column one) 2) Options available (column two) and 3) selected targeting by the user (column three).
Then I worked on codifying settings and creating consistency across each targeting type.
Reducing learning curve
When it came to features like ‘Scheduling’, one could see the parallels with platforms like Google Calendar. To reduce the learning curve, I borrowed interactions from ‘Working hours’ feature. This allowed user to understand the usage quickly.
Contextualising information
I iterated a lot on how to showcase information in a useful way, as this is a content heavy product, reducing the load on user to make sense is key. One example of it being the audiences table, where user can upload data and create segments of audiences.
From research we knew, these segments will be updated very frequently and to assure the user that their updates have happened, I added a last modified column that showed relative timestamps to give a sense of real-time updates.
Bringing users & business closer
I strategised and conducted generative research that became the foundation for understanding all the different types of users of the platform. I utilised journey mapping tool to facilitate the conversation with users. I used a similar format to showcase the mental modals of the user to my stakeholders through a detailed deck.
This deck was referred often to make decisions on roadmaps and prioritisation.
A bit about what I learned..
Working with ambiguity
Beyond a vague north star, there was little clarity on what to build, which meant no clear list of requirements. This presented the opportunity to bring design into the process of thinking about the ‘what’ and not just the ‘how’. Through quick and iterative wire-framing and prototyping, we were able to push the conversation forward, facilitate discussions and create a path to first envision and eventually build this platform. This allowed and created space for the design team to play the role of product thinkers and drive the direction of the platform.
Learning from industry-standard
When many such solutions already exist in the market, it can be very easy to fall back on the industry design patterns. Sometimes, this is great as it can reduce the learning curve for the user and help us quickly understand the domain and flows. But sometimes, especially in B2B platforms, this can be a slippery slope to repeating their mistakes. Here, I worked on many solutions with the team that had to break the existing notions and improve the experience for the user.
Parking lots
The advantage designers have is quick prototyping to give ideas tangible form. I nudged the team to utilize this superpower, to anchor discussions with the product and engineering team to evaluate implementation. When ideas turned out to be either very engineering heavy or had unclear desirability, I parked these as ‘Future enhancements’ for the next versions when we had better insights and the team had more bandwidth.
Building design capacity
For a relatively new product team, I took our counterparts through the design process and in doing that, made them partners in defining problem statements, scoping work, writing user goals, and user stories. Through workshops and facilitated conversation, I uncovered knowledge and use cases. I became an advocate for the iterative process as well as for users during decision-making. And all of this became possible by building relationships.
A case for research
I was able to navigate through resistance from extended stakeholders to give designers access to users, which from here on made it easier for the design team to get access to external users for usability studies. I was able to convince and mobilize stakeholders within the team to get access to external users and hands-on ran a generative study.
One platform thinking
When working with parts or in silos, sometimes the whole picture gets lost. I worked hard during the course of this project to keep an eagle eye view and make sure that different parts come together to give a seamless experience to the user. This meant bringing many teams together and aligning on an overall experience, prioritising user needs over tech bandwidth when necessary and making difficult trade offs.