Twitter: Awareness advertising

Redesigning the user flow to book high-visibility ad formats

BACKGROUND

The Trend Takeover is a high spend, high visibility ad format with a limited supply (1/day), and accounts for ~30% of the ad business. However, it can only be booked by advertisers who have a dedicated CS manager through a very manual process and outdated platform which has not been updated since launching in 2011. This project is the first milestone in redesigning the booking experience for Trend Takeovers.

MY ROLE

I led projects on the advertiser experience team, designing tools that a business uses to create ads. I led this project and partnered with product and research to better define the problem. I was responsible for translating our ideas into design artifacts like user flows, journey maps, and wireframes in order to align and inform the larger team.

THE CHALLENGE

Ultimately, we wanted to make the booking process for Trend Takeovers easier to setup and manage, and make them more accessible to all advertisers. Additionally we want to integrate Trend Takeovers with the rest of our ad offerings that exist on ads.twitter.com.

EVALUATING THE PROBLEM

We knew that in order to book a Trend Takeover, there was a lot of back and forth between the client and the CS manager. We conducted user interviews with both CS managers and clients in order to better understand the specific nuances and pain points that both parties experienced during the booking process.

"I always think, 'why can't I just see a calendar of dates that are available to book so I don't have to waste so much time emailing back and forth with my manager?'"

- Top client of Timeline Takeover products

"The client often comes back last minute with edits to the creative. I spend a lot of time mocking things up for them."

- CS Manager

I outlined our findings in a customer journey map, identifying the different surfaces and touchpoints involved in the booking process, as well as the sentiment around each part of the process. This helped us identify the biggest pain points to tackle first.

ANALYZING THE COMPETITORS

We reviewed competitor offerings that were similar to Trend Takeovers and their associated booking process. Most notably, we found that YouTube offered the ability for anyone to "preview" their ad on their own terms, alleviating the main pain point that CS managers experience with Trend Takeovers.

UNDERSTANDING THE TWITTER ECOSYSTEM

After evaluating the user pain points and it was clear that the bigger picture vision was to move the booking process to ads.twitter.com, where the rest of our ad products lived. This solution entailed a massive undertaking from engineering since the product was currently built on an entirely different platform and spanned across several engineering teams. I leaned heavily on product to better understand these limitations and the appropriate milestones to reach.

CONCEPT SKETCHING

I explored a variety of different concepts that integrated Timeline Takeovers into the current architecture and navigation on ads.twitter.com. In doing so, I discussed these different concepts with my direct team to understand what parts of the booking process would best fit into ads.twitter.com.

DESIGN ITERATIONS

Based on our internal feedback and level of effort associated with different parts of the larger project, we determined that the first milestone would be redesigning the Trends-Dashboard page to integrate better into ads.twitter.com and to account for media integration, a major pain point noted by CS managers. Through the design process, I setup feedback rounds with designers responsible for our Campaign Form and Global Navigation projects to ensure cohesion in design patterns and user flows.

MVP PROPOSAL

I put together a proposal of how the first milestone from above could fit into the larger vision of moving Trend Takeovers to ads.twitter.com. This helped the team get on the same page, helped visualize future milestones in the project, as well as provided a mockup to socialize with other teams and executives.

NEXT STEPS

The first milestone to redesign the Trends Dashboard is in development, and was a big step forward towards the larger vision. Once built, we plan to first release this to a few CS managers and their associated clients for feedback sessions. The patterns we created allow for easier integration into ads.twitter.com. Eventually, we'd like to integrate the calendar viewport into ads.twitter.com, however this entails a larger conversation with the Sales team and those associated with the current calendar booking process. It's most important to remember that this timeline and milestones will shift depending on feedback along the way.

TAKEAWAYS

I really enjoyed the opportunity to dive deep in customer journey mapping in the beginning of this project. It provided a great example of how product, research, and design can work together to identify and prioritize pain points.

This project was uniquely challenging due to the limited shared knowledge about Trend Takeovers and their current functionality. Throughout the project, I found myself having to be incredibly resourceful to find the right people to answer my questions. This often involved colleagues who I wouldn't normally engage with, and it showed the value of having allies and contacts in other sides of the business, especially at a larger organization like Twitter.

Lastly, this project reminded me that the superpower of a designer is to provide visual artifacts that allow different teams and stakeholders to get on the same page, and ultimately guide conversation towards a shared vision.