Summary
Company: OpenX
Project period: June 2018- October 2018
Role: UX Design Lead
Software: Sketch, inVision, Lucidchart, and RealtimeBoard
Mobile Parallel Mediation platform was the biggest project I worked on at OpenX, providing mobile app publishers an ad platform to onboard their inventory, manage demand partners, and monitor ad performance in one place. This was a brand new focus for the company when we first started, so I led some cross-functional team alignment exercises to make sure we understand the users and the problems we’re trying to solve, and the competition in the market using following design artifacts.
Customer segments and proto-personas
We started by understanding which customer segments we have advantage in. Since this is a new business for us, before we have actual customers, we came up with proto-personas, assumption based personas to categorize the type of users we should be designing for. This was also a great exercise for the entire team to start building empathy and thinking the users. The idea is to validate if the assumptions we made in our proto-personas are correct by interviewing prospect customers once business team obtains some.
Customer journey map
I interviewed our internal users, ad operation specialists, to understand the tasks they needed to perform with existing platform. I then created a customer journey map to illustrate the process an ad operation specialist need to go through, and highlight the pain points they’re currently experiencing. I presented this map to the entire scrum team, and the engineers realized how painful the experience was due to the existing design of the system, and people voluntarily started to create dev tickets to fix some of the uncovered usability issues in existing platform.
Competitive analysis
I worked with product owner to identify critical tasks the user need to perform in the new mobile platform. I also worked with business research team to identify who are our biggest competitors in this new offering. Next, I performed detailed, step-by-step analysis with each of the competitor’s product and created a document to present to the team. In the document, I provided screenshots of each products, comparing to our existing, non-mobile-focused product, and highlight the opportunity areas we can focus on.
User Story Map
I facilitated the user story map working session to assist our product owner gather requirements based on tasks user need to go through using our product. This artifact created a visual way to understand what we need to build and how the features will be used for the users. It also helped product owners to manage their roadmaps by understanding the end-to-end scope and identifying what’s MVP and what is nice-to-have enhancements.
Sketches
I always started designing with rough sketches, so that people won’t be attached to a concept because of the visual representation. Here are some examples of various design concepts I was exploring during the design process
Usability Testing
I built a prototype and tested with 3 internal users. After the usability testing, I created a deck summarizing the research learnings, with some short clips from the studies, so that everyone on the team got to hear what the users say about the design.
Design
Final Thoughts
It is a challenging project for me to introduce design processes to the team that knew very little about what designers can help with other than creating pixel-perfect UI mockups. Therefore, I spent a lot of time hosting working sessions with product owners and engineers to discuss what our customers would need, before jumping into design solutions. If I had a magic wand to go back again and fix one thing, I would love to get sponsor from product leadership to help us connect with potential customers, so that we wouldn’t need to make so many assumptions in the beginnings.
In the meantime, based on some internal interview with customer services team members, there are a few things we can run experiments with to see if it truly solves customer’s pain points.
Provide more guidance on balancing ad revenues v.s. end user experience. Our customers, mobile app developers and/or Ad operations specialists, really do care about their user’s experience using their apps because app store reviews are important for them and they don’t want their users become frustrated due to overwhelming amount of ads in the app. However, they also need to make profit by gaining revenues from advertisement. How to strike the balance between the two major business goals is challenging, and since OpenX has been handling all the bidding mechanism for various companies and we know user’s behavior when seeing the ads, there’s an opportunity for us to provide intelligent guidance to our customers.
Streamline SDK integration process. Due to the narrower scope of MVP, we’re not able to tackle what happens after our users setup inventory and demand using the UI. There’s a series of actions required for app developers to download our SDK, integrate the SDK to their apps by writing codes in their environments, test and troubleshoot during the integration process. It requires a lot of back and forth conversation between different parties within their organization and with OpenX business teams. There’s an opportunity to provide a light weight dev tool for customers to integrate and test out our SDK more easily.