Marketing automation platform
Role
Leading the shift to user-centered design
Design was initially viewed primarily as a UI function, limiting its strategic potential.
Through every project, I advocated for UX/UI design by showcasing how user-centred design could directly support stakeholders’ objectives:
- Increased customer retention
- Reduced support costs
- And its critical role in automation by streamlining processes
Problem
Usability & lovability challenges in AdZu
AdZu, an Omnicom B2B SaaS platform for automated ad production, was developed with limited user input, leading to significant usability issues upon rollout.
As it expanded from serving car retailers to a broader market — including clients like Best Western, Castrol, Christie’s, Domino’s, Jaguar Land Rover, L’Oreal, Mercedes-Benz, and Telstra — early feedback from users and experts revealed critical pain points, including:
- Unclear and inefficient workflows.
- Lack of intuitive features, causing inefficiencies.
- Low user satisfaction and adoption rates.
- UI issues.
Step 1: Foundations
Define UX/UI principles for the software
Step 2: Modernising the UI
Customisable shortcuts and styling
Designing a homepage with customisable shortcuts and styling offered a strategic opportunity to empower customers to brand their platform and organise it according to their unique priorities and workflows.
Current design:
Re-visited design: An immersive full-width layout with large images
- I used a ‘mobile approach’ to create an immersive shortcut grid (The flexi-tiles) to revisit the current UI.
- The challenge was to find a pattern to display a ‘completed’ grid. The clever tiles organise themselves to fill the screen from left to right, top to bottom.
- The page styling can be customised with brand colours, corner shapes (square/rounded), fonts, and title style.
Step 3: UX introduction
The introduction of UX to support UI enhancements
I used the current software gallery to demonstrate UI is linked to the page functionalities. In other words, revising the information structure and grouping functionalities was necessary to evolve the UI.
Current design:
Re-visited design:
Step 4: Flow improvement
Through a collaborative design process, I helped the team explore intuitive, efficient, and automation-driven solutions.
Discover & define
Understanding the software’s collective vision and turning it into actionable UX
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Gathered user feedback from internal teams (customer support, sales, product, and management) to pinpoint critical usability pain points.
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Fostered cross-departmental collaboration to align on usability priorities and establish shared goals.
Vision
We believe that if the user can automate the ad production and trafficking, we will increase user adoption
User insights
Interview of the future potential users to understand their workflow and behaviour to optimise workflows and address key friction points
Assumptions
Our users are media planners and designers
- The media buyer defines the ad specifications (‘where’ and ‘when’)
- The designer defines the ad templates (‘what’)
- Other users are in charge of the coordination and control.
The software is missing the production brief
The artwork production brief regroups media specifications (when, where, and how long…) and related creative work (what).
Inspiration
Review competitors’ solutions
Ideation
Prototype hypotheses to test and validate new automation flows
Low-volume ad production proposal:
Generate all possible artworks, select the required ones, and add the traffic data.
High-volume ad production proposal:
Produce only the artwork required for the campaign, mirroring real-life practices.
Prototyping & testing
Create low-fidelity prototypes of the different approaches to conduct tests to refine the user experience
Issues:
- Time-consuming: Artwork selection demands effort, and artworks can only be processed one-by-one.
- Increased risk of errors: Artworks often look similar, making them hard to distinguish and raising the chance of errors.
- Doesn’t lead to automation
Benefits:
- Efficiency for small batches: If only one or two artworks need to be trafficked, the process becomes faster and more manageable, reducing complexity and effort.
Intended target audience:
- Local businesses, such as car retailers, that need to apply templates provided by headquarters, ensuring brand consistency and efficient workflow.
Issues:
- Time-consuming: Artwork selection demands considerable effort and slows down workflows.
- Increased risk of errors: Artworks often look similar, making them hard to distinguish and raising the chance of errors.
- Partial automation: Artwork and transaction associations can be suggested by the system, but human verification remains essential to ensure accuracy.
Benefits:
- Efficiency Gains: Ability to manage and traffick multiple artworks simultaneously, improving overall workflow speed and productivity.
Issues:
- Efficiency Lost: The process becomes less efficient when only a small batch of 1 to 2 artworks is required.
Benefits:
- Increased efficiency: Relies on existing production briefs to streamline the process.
- Decreased risk of errors: Artworks are not manually picked, and the production brief organizes everything in a structured table, reducing errors.
- Automation: Artwork and transaction associated—production can be launched with just a button press.
Target Audience:
- Marketing and advertising agencies looking for efficient, scalable, and error-reduced solutions.
Results
Hybrid approach
The UX proposal and its execution, Transactions +, were preferred for their efficiency, ease of use, and accuracy:
- Consolidating traffic data, artwork selection, and transaction details in one place, streamlines workflows, enhances decision-making, and minimises errors.
- Ultimately, it provides a scalable, intuitive, and future-proof solution for managing marketing and transaction processes effectively.
However, a hybrid approach incorporating the Ephemeral guide should be considered to accommodate clients with lower production volume needs.
Step 5: Design
Two user journeys for the AdBuilder
AdZu’s AdBuilder streamlines ad production by allowing users to easily customise and resize ads. Users can select a template (banner, poster, etc.) and tailor the copy, images, and dimensions to generate the required ad variations.
The tool supports both low and high volumes of ad outputs, making it flexible for different campaign needs.
Current design:
Re-visited design: Dual-workflow
Low-volume ad production workflow
- Handpick templates and enter customisation.
- Ad visualisation panel for visualising for control.
High-volume ad production workflow
- Users can create/import spreadsheets with the ad variations.
- Optimises the process for speed, simplicity, and reduced errors.
