Adludio Direct

UX Case Study

Overview and My Role.

Adludio Direct is a SaaS (software as a service) platform that streamlines the entire creative workflow of a mobile advertising campaign from conception to serving. The challenge was to create an easy to use platform for clients that still integrates well with our internal platforms used by campaign managers and designers.

I was the sole UX designer for this product from 2017 - 2019. I worked with two product managers and a development team to create a product that cuts out the middle man in a users journey to create a mobile advertising campaign and puts the control in their hands in an easy and clear to use way. * To comply with an NDA, some confidential information has been omitted

Main Tasks

Stakeholder Interviews
User Research
Scoping and user stories
Design
User Testing

Adludio has an agency side and a product side which meant easy access to our end users so the perfect opportunity for in-depth user research to make sure we were addressing their needs and creating the best way for them to manage a campaign.

User Research

Firstly I sent out surveys to our client base to determine who would benefit for a product like this and to discover their pain points in dealing with Adludio as a company. I selected 12 participants for user interviews from a selection of Adludio’s agency side clients. These were the main users Adludio Direct was being built as a solution for. During the interviews they were asked a number of questions including around issues they had while communicating with different members of the Adludio sales, design and campaign management teams. One of the main takeaways of this was that most clients had a problem with understanding the progress of their campaigns and what stage each team was at. This information paved the way for the decision to have a central dashboard as the homepage for Adludio Direct.

The results from these extensive interviews were used to form personas for our users and in the creation of user stories that led to feature decisions and designs. Along with the project managers we held workshops to create user journeys for these features that relied on our understanding of the end users gathered in the interviews.

Main Dashboard

The biggest UX challenge faced was making sure that all the most valuable information was present on the main dashboard in a clear and concise way. The dashboard shows the user the progress of all their campaigns such as what stage they are in and nearest deadline. It was decided that the most important information the dashboard should show is: Project Name, Next Deadline, Current Stage, Team Members and the final complete by date. Originally the primary call to action button: New Project, was placed in the top navigation bar but after user testing it was decided to exclusively be on the dashboard, making the dashboard the most important and therefore primary page of the Adludio Direct platform.

It was also important to make it quick and easy for a user to find the most relevant information they need about their campaigns so a simple filter and search bar were added to the dashboard. In the original wireframes and before user testing there was a global search bar in the navigation but this was removed later and only added to the dashboard. This was because a few features were skipped and the search was only necessary for finding specific campaigns.

New Project

The new project form needed to have all the information a singular campaign would need as well as making it as simple as possible for the user to input it. The biggest challenge was designing how the function of adding team members would work, there needed to be away to add a team member but to easily remove them if a mistake was made and to invite a new user to the platform if the team member had yet to sign up.

It was decided to have plus or minus icons next to the team members name to add or remove them and a pop up with a place to add the users email address if they needed to be invited.

The function of choosing a placement went through a few iterations to made it as quick as possible to find a specific placement in a long list. The placements allowed users to choose mobile, social or desktop placements and then specific sizes within those categories.

The initial solution was found through user testing, to confuse the user because it required them to click through to different pages and they got lost. Instead a dropdown method was decided upon where the user could easily collapse or expand the different placement types to see and select their sizes.

Campaign Overview

The overview of the campaign needed to show everything that was a field in the new project form as well as showing specific details about the many possible creatives one campaign could have. It also needed to allow the user access to a larger preview of each creative or allow the designer access to the design suite for the creative.

The stage of each creative was clearly listed right underneath the creative preview as well as showing what placement type it is. Everything in the overview page needed to be editable in case changes needed to be made.

Specific Campaign View High Fidelity@2x.png

Integration

The flow of integration between this client facing platform and the internal platforms used by in house designers and campaign managers posed a challenge. They needed to follow the same personality of Adludio Direct but function as their own platform. Luckily clients do not see them and internal employees could be taught how to use them. The studio that the designers used was preexisting and just needed a redesign.

The dashboard needed to show the clients creatives that they would see on their campaign overview page but with designers special access to studio. The campaign management dashboard was a fair bit more complicated and needed to go through thorough testing. It shows the campaign manager all the analytics from specific campaigns so they can monitor how they are doing.

The MVP just showed the numbers in a table and a filter for yesterday, today and overall. Version 1 proved more complicated as users needed to be tested to see what way to benchmark campaign results worked best for them. Three different options were presented to users during testing and the results were conclusive that colour coding was preferred.

Brand Guidelines

The user interface of the Adludio Direct platform had to align with the main companies branding while being slightly unique. As Adludio colours are purple, two different shades of purple were selected as primary and secondary colours.

The font chosen was Avenir Light and Avenir Roman, these fonts are also used in all aspects of the Adludio business.