David Schneller
Portfolio
Ad Campaign Monitoring
Developing monitoring tools to explore the future of ad operations and ad sales workflows
Schibsted sells online advertising inventory on most of their online products and has sales departments that monitor the performance of advertising campaigns to make sure that goals are met and communicate campaign results. This app was developed as a proof of concept to test and show how professional users can benefit from live data on a mobile device.
I wrote a blog post for the Schibsted tech blog about this project and how we used it to learn. You can read it here: Experimental Apps For Internal Users
In Schibsted we were developing solutions for creating advertising campaign reports that showed key metrics like Click Trough Rate (CTR), Cost per Click (CPC) and so on. The campaign reports needed time to be created and were usually created by another department at the end of campaigns.
The availability of up-to-date data was limited. Therefore we created this easy to use mobile application that could display live data and easily create customized data slices that present different views on the campaign.
Design Process
The concept was based on research and knowledge from another project for static campaign reports. Additionally the whole project was meant to be an experiment with limited amount of time and people on the team.
- Desk research prepared me to understand the world of online advertising, the metrics that are used and grasping easier what our users are doing and need.
- We did user interviews to learn more about how ad campaigns in the Schibsted departments are handled, how communication works between stakeholders and which information are important at what stages.
- Wireframes were created with pen+paper and Axure RP Pro to discuss concepts with the team and them over to the visual designer.
- We held a design workshop with participants from the department preparing the reports for advertising sales departments. They provided good insights into what data is important and when it is misinterpreted but the sales departments.
Project Takeaways
- It would have been beneficial as UX to get a head start on the project and be able to identify and confirm the right users for the product and how their workflow looks like before aiming for direction based on previous research.
- Mobile projects require a better understanding of the context and circumstances the users are working in. Solutions need to account for things like the devices that are usually carried by the user at certain times and the locations they are used in.
- Providing a prototype of a solution is a great way to help users think about usage scenarios and give feedback. The fidelity can be quite low. A clickable mockup on the target device was similarly helpful as a working native app with real data.
- Engineers were passionate about the project and loved contributing ideas and improvements. Opinions could sometimes differ but testing the ideas with users and going for the best performing one was something that everybody was happy with.
- Context
- A project with a small team inside Schibsted Product & Technology that I worked in
- Duration
- 4 months
- Used skills
- Teamwork in a distributed team, Axure wireframing and prototyping, user interviews, user testing, design workshops
- Division of work
- This was a new project with a team of 5-6 people with me as a UX designer, a visual designer and 3-4 engineers. Visual designs were done based on my wireframes and then implemented by engineering.