Xandr - Ad Tech

Project: Media Plan Refresh

Brief Background on the Product

Xandr is an Ad space marketplace for for Digital and TV
I take ownership in the TV vertical where buyers come to buy ad space on various TV mediums, and media owners come to monetize their viewership.
This viewership is broken up by platform (Broadcast TV vs Smart TV) but also demographics (Age, Gender, Etc).
Media Plan is our tool for buyers to see how media owners are delivering or have delivered on their contracted targets for impressions.

Challenges & Goals

Open AP (a conglomerate of sellers) integration was going to add sellers to our platform that are not going to report the same data that our sellers reported.

We had extra developer bandwidth so we were able to sell the product team on giving us (limited) time for a design refresh as well.

Starting Point

Targets:
- Find a way to display asymmetric data
- Make room for more Sellers
- Update color scheme (for consistency after this product was acquired by Xandr)
-Reorg the page with some user feedback

Step 1: gathering Research Resources

Due to limits on communication about this project we had essentially no direct access to our user base. We had to rely on internal means of gathering insight and feedback.
Luckily, we had a handful of coworkers who dealt directly with customers and used to work in industry themselves.
These 3 coworkers were used for quick feedback session to make sure we weren’t venturing too far off path.

Step 2 - Design & Iteration

Challenge 1: Page Reorg & new color scheme
- Align new designs with color scheme used by the rest of the company. (new designs are in purple
- Add more useful information at the top of the page.
- Swap some of the indicators lower on the page with other (research showed they were using antiquated data).
Challenge 2: Handle Asymmetric data
- Usually most graphs are blends of all the sellers combined.
- Finding ways to indicate some sections show data from one type of seller
- Prioritize isolating the lack of data if possible
Challenge 3: Make room for more sellers
- Adding OpenAP to our collection of sellers were going to more than double the amount possible with each deal.
- On top of the number of sellers, each seller “card” was going to have to signify which category it was (Xandr vs OpenAP).
- Internal user feedback I got on the first iteration was that they don’t have enough info to be useful. I needed to add more metrics.
- After several iterations of trying to design cleaner seller cards with more information I was starting to hit a local optimum. I had to try a different way of displaying the data.
- I switched my designs to a table approach. Tables allowed us to display more sellers, and more information in a scalable way.
- Some final changes ended up having to be made because some OpenAP Sellers were not going to provide logos for our table. Despite this I still color coded the table to help users with visual search

Final Designs

- New Color Scheme
- Reorganized Layout
- Color coded table replaces Seller “cards”
- Asymmetric data isolated or labelled if not possible.

Step 4 - Post Mortem Review

What went wrong

Lots of effort spent on Seller Cards because of good feedback (fool me twice shame on me)
Planning for edge cases and constraints at the beginning of the project
Designing without direct user feedback/input.

What went right?

Positive feedback
More design consistency throughout the site
Added functionality without much added complexity (something that is a constant struggle in ad tech)

Other Examples from Xandr

As a Senior Product Designer at Xandr, I have been working on more complex workflows in a B2B space. This brought new challenges, such as constrained user research opportunities, working with legacy component libraries, and SME level learning requirements, but also opened more opportunities for me to design data visualizations, work on team management, and focus on ease of use instead of conversion rates.