Cadent Advertising Platform
Campaign Editing Workflows
Powering up an ad buying platform for volume and scale
Ad campaign planning is a complex area of expertise, often performed by white-glove Managed Service teams working with multiple clients. In a period of rapid expansion, a new client increased Cadent's volume of advertisements by 5-10x. The Managed Service team needed new tools to select multiple line items, in order to make sensitive technical changes on a large scale.
ROLE Senior UX and UI designer for DSP planning application
CONCEPT A bulk editing solution to accelerate Managed Service operations
METHODOLOGY Discovery and design in collaboration with Product, Engineering, and Managed Service teams
TECHNOLOGY Browser-based Demand Side Platform (DSP) built in React
In collaboration with Sales and Product Management, we conducted multi-stage interviews with the Managed Service team ("AdOps"). This exposed pain points and bottlenecks that would need to be solved in order to meet the changing needs of the platform.
Business Requirements
Larger volume A new client, an increase in ad campaigns by a factor of 5-10x.
Short timeline Volume was expected to ramp up quickly for the political season, giving me to 2 sprints (or about 1 month) to ideate and iterate designs
User Advocacy
Expert users Incoming campaigns were being handled by an in-house Managed Service team
Flexibility Tasks were being handled with several manual tools and processes, often requiring tedious repetition and close attention to detail
FINDINGS Improvements were needed at two points in the platform workflow: the processing of orders, and the editing of ad campaigns. Both workflows were redesigned iteratively, over multiple phases, with the goal of reducing effort, improving efficiency, and enriching the platform experience.
Orders Flow
Incoming orders required a complex flow, managing the interactions between the client, who was passing the orders into the system, and the Managed Service end user, who was reviewing, modifying, and activating orders.
Bulk Edit Flow
Campaigns could contain hundreds of ads, and selecting and editing these in bulk required close attention to detail. The UI had to make selection intuitive and flexible, and it had to provide maximum freedom to make changes, while maintaining guardrails against high-impact user error.
Order Inbox
New Orders
Users on the Managed Service team were manually entering orders from emailed spreadsheets
The new process posted them directly into an inbox in the platform
Orders could be manually reviewed before being processed into campaigns
Revisions
Some orders required existing campaigns to be identified and updated
For these orders, a new passthrough workflow was devised
All orders would appear in the same platform inbox, but they would be clearly flagged as "New" or "Revision"
Changes would be made automatically, unless the system flagged the revision for review
Bulk Editing
After the orders were processed into Campaign objects in the system, Managed Service users would have to make frequent changes, often responding to evolving conditions in the marketplace. To do this for large numbers of ads across multiple campaigns, they needed tools to select multiple objects and make sweeping changes in a practical and predictable way.
Efficiency and Flexibility
Bulk editing controls needed to be granular, unambiguous, and predictable. The bulk edit form was focused on presenting the right options at the right time.
Select for Bulk Edit
Users required multiple routes to selecting objects, according to several criteria (type, date, ad group, etc).
Edit by Type
Bulk edit forms needed to reflect which fields would be most useful for the operator. These fields were determined through user interviews and observation.
Meeting client needs,
improving the platform experience
The new bulk edit features were introduced as DSP traffic was ramping up. The workflow allowed the operations and planning teams to keep up and get ahead of client expectations.
5-10x increase in orders
driven by a major client during a busy political season
75% reduction in time spent per order
by reducing repetitive tasks and unifying the process within the platform
Positive feedback from stakeholders
including both internal Managed Service users and the client teams passing the orders to the system