My manager tasked me with creating a new campaign creation page that would enhance the user experience by aligning with the mental models of other platforms. The goal was to reduce cognitive load and make the process more intuitive for users.

As an ad network, Media Nexus collaborates with both advertisers and publishers. Our main clientele, the advertisers, fall into three distinct categories: brand owners, media buyers, and affiliates.

I met a handful of media buyers and affiliates at various conferences my company participated in. Following these events, I scheduled several follow-up conversations with them to better understand their pain points. During these conversations, I asked questions such as:

Additionally, I gained more technical insight like...

I found that building trust is crucial since we are a new traffic source. Offering relevant targeting options is also essential, as media buyers use both narrow and broad targeting for different campaign goals. Using an excel sheet, I outlined some of their main pain points into the following points:

This led me to form the following user problem:

To build user trust, we needed to make the media buying platform feel familiar, similar to other platforms they already use.

‍We also needed to humanize the experience by providing easy access to account managers for support, ensuring advertisers felt confident in their media buys. Additionally, offering extensive targeting options was crucial so media buyers could optimize their campaigns and eliminate unprofitable placements, leading to better performance.

I audited five leading digital media buying platforms, detailing everything from their sign on experience to what options they have for audience, placement, and geographic targeting.

I cleaned up the pages to reduce visual clutter and adjusted the titles to better align with the formats used by competitors, and experimented with different layouts for the campaign creation process, comparing a sidebar layout to a top-bar layout

I redesigned the traffic estimator to focus on only the necessary information, reducing clutter and making it more streamlined and easier for users to digest. This approach made the tool much clearer and more user-friendly, especially for those with less expertise.

For the creatives upload section, I worked with engineers to gather information, then reorganized it to create a more user-friendly layout.

The platform introduces a guided user experience with a tutorial video and tooltips to help users navigate new targeting options without overwhelming them. Each section is split across separate pages, minimizing cognitive load. A "Save as Draft" feature allows flexibility in campaign creation.

- 75% increase in campaign launch rate
- 4.6 satisfaction score
- Over 800 campaigns launched
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"This new campaign creation page looks and feels great."
- Advertiser
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Advertisers utilized the new tutorial videos and help guides, allowing them to create campaigns independently, which reduced the workload on our account managers.

Unfortunately, in 2018, Media Nexus Network officially closed its doors.

Despite successfully onboarding hundreds of publishers and advertisers, the main challenge was balancing publisher compensation with advertiser performance. This imbalance ultimately led to the platform's closure, though the company later evolved into a media buying and advertising agency.

The experience was invaluable, providing me with key insights and introducing me to UI/UX, which greatly shaped the next steps in my career.