Yahoo Ad Tech Platform Innovative MVP Proposal
Make Influencer Marketing a new buying channel into the existing platform.
Duration
01/2021 - 05/2021
Role
Lead UX Designer
Team
2 Product Managers
1 Lead UX Designer
1 Lead Engineer
With the support from business & sales team
Background
The recent massive growth of social media platform makes it an emerging channel of gaining more attentions from customizable groups of audiences. Among all the social media advertising channels, influencer marketing has become one of the most popular inventories.
Therefore, more and more advertisers are seeking opportunities to reach, connect and collaborate with the influencers in an efficient / programmatic way.
Benefit for the business
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Power the OKR of an Omni-channel DSP.
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Make more inventories available to the advertisers.
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Widen the publisher’s market.
Benefit for the users
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For the existing users, they’ll get access to a new advertising channel and expand their methods of targeting without learning/buying an extra product.
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For the potential users who are interested in social media advertising, they’ll be able to be on boarded to the platform with a smooth, easy-to-learn experience.
The Objectives
By making a proof-of-concept MVP, we wanted to validate the premise of the influencer marketing as a sub-product on the existing Yahoo DSP platform. We wanted to test hypotheses about the market needs, to make adjustments to the product vision, and to prioritize where to invest in the future.
Target User Groups
Power users who are familiar with the existing channels in the platform, and want to extend their reach through the new influencer marketing channel.
Potential new users who are onboarded for the influencer marketing channel, but also want to explore other omni-channel solutions.
Illustrations designed by pch.vector / Freepik
MVP Design Criteria
🎼
Consistent with the current platform
🕹
Effective, Efficient, Satisfying
💻
Easy to learn
The Challenge
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How to create a smooth onboarding experience for both user types?
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How to keep the Influencer Marketing Planner consistent with the existing platform UI?
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How to introduce and promote the new channel to the advertisers in an efficient way?
Step By Step Approach
Considering the scale and complexity of the project, we broke the workflow down into 3 phases: Proposal set up, proposal confirmation, and campaign running.
We set up user test sessions for the phase 1 designs, in order to validate the product concept, better understand the needs of power users, and gather feedback for future iterations.
Phase 1 User Testing
We have run 7 sessions with internal campaign managers (power users) who had experiences with influencer marketing before.
Due to time and budget limitations, we didn't have a chance to talk to less experienced users or external users.
Key Findings
✅ The similarity of the current UI was helpful for first-time users to quickly navigate through.
✅ The overall workflow of proposal set up was easy to follow, as it was aligned with how campaign managers currently set up other types of campaigns.
⛔️ Some detailed flows have spaces for improvement, e.g. Budget set up, required posts, legal documents.
⛔️ The process was lack of instructions -- Users were confused by the new metrics and vocabularies, they were also not sure whether the filters were for the end-audience of the ads, or for the influencers.
✅ Users loved the proposal summary screens, finding the status and next steps were clear.
I really love the proposal overview page as it gives security and you see chat history and status all in one place.
Phase 1 Design Iterations
We separated the workflow for power users and less-experienced users, in order to provide customizable experience for them to accomplish the tasks.
We added smart guides and floating help tooltips as instant assistance when the user is setting up a proposal.
We kept the designs for proposal review, and put more thoughts into the followup steps.
Key Results & Future Plan
Through several rounds of ideation, research and design iterations, we've accomplished a high level user flow map of the Influencer Marketing Planner of Yahoo DSP. We've built mid-fidelity key screens of the MVP, and validated the product concept from user & stakeholder feedback sessions.
Due to time and resource constraints, there are future steps that we haven't accomplished yet:
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To confirm detailed configurations within each step.
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To think through the follow-up steps after a proposal has been confirmed.
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To think about legal/technical/systematic limitations.