Sharethrough for Publishers

THE CLIENT

Sharethrough's product, SFP, provided a platform for ad publishers to easily monetize their sites and apps.

Senior Designer | UX/UI Design | Research

THE STORY

Sharethrough is an omnichannel supply side platform that specializes in programmatic advertising. I led the overall design approach for Sharethrough's customer-facing application for ad publishers, Sharethrough for Publishers (SFP).

THE PROCESS

Diving into this new space, I first explored the current experience to understand ‘who’ and ‘how’ customers used the platform. This would give insight into problem areas, what was already working well, and help determine areas of opportunity to build better experiences.

My approach started with an audit—digging into customer tickets, platform data, and interviews with the internal team (Customer support, Sales, Product + Development). I then conducted user research (interviews, onsite observations, card sorting), which allowed me to identify our key customer archetypes and focus on key areas that would have the most impact on our customer base.

STR-Test placement Screen Shot 2018-02-13 at 12.48.07 PM

RESEARCH + DEFINITION

STR_initialAudit-Comments — Initial audit - partial feedback

STR_userResearch-reporting II — Initial audit - Reporting comments

STR_initialAudit-Heuristics9 — Initial audit - Heuristics evaluation

STR_userResearch-method — User research - method + participants

STR_userResearch-cardSorting — User research - Card sorting

STR_userResearch-diagram — User research - mapping opportunities

STR_userResearch-archetypes — Defining customer archetypes

STR_archetypes-teamOne — Archetype sample

DESIGN

Based on user data and research, we determined that improving the Custom Reporting experience had a high potential of delivering a positive impact. Not only was this a common user action, it involved a lot of customer time as well as time and resources from the Sharethrough team.

STR- Reporting whiteboard - custom report 1 — Whiteboarding sessions - data mapping

STR-whiteboard - custom report 2 — Reporting whiteboard - data mapping

DEVELOP + TEST

After several working sessions with the product owner and internal team, I explored ideas around the design direction. I moved into building out a hi-fidelity prototype that would allow my team to test this approach with users before moving into development. I was able to build a prototype that included all micro-interactions and would be a replica of the final product.

We were able to significantly bring down the overall time and resources spent by this process improvement. The original time to deliver a custom report to customers ranged from 1-3 days; with this redesign we were able to define a flow process that would deliver reports within several minutes and eliminate the need for the Sharethrough team to manually create these reports for customers (an activity they were doing at the time).

STR-Report empty state — Custom reports - empty state

STR-Custom report drag n drop — Report form - empty state

STR-Custom report build — Report form - populated

STR Create Custom Report user flow — Reporting flow

STR - Custom Report test results — Test results

Original time to complete: ~1-3 days

Before/baseline

Average time to complete E2E: 2:54 min

After

THE OUTCOME

My time at Sharethrough was unfortunately cut short, as the company ultimately sunsetted the publisher platform to focus their efforts on the advertiser platform. During my time there, however, I was able to strengthen my research and design strategy skills, as well as build some amazing relationships with an innovative product team.