CrossX - Client Portal
Pre-campaign dashboard for business customers
Collaborated across two feature teams to lead a design from the ground up. Client portal successfully was built as a new onboarding module for external clients, reducing the average lead time from 6 to 4 workdays. With this module, we achieved the first milestone in enabling self-service ad provisioning.
Appier is a SaaS company in unicorn status that offers AI-driven products and services to help companies help companies with various aspects of their operations, including advertising, customer engagement, and data analysis.
Role
Product Design & Strategy
Timeline
Apr - Jul 2023
Product team
Sole designer / 2 product managers
Development team
2 Engineering teams (5 Front-end / 4 Back-end)
My Role
01 User interview
Conducted user interviews to specify user requirements across 4 positions (Sales, Account manager, Tech support, Campaign manager) from 5 regions (TW/JP/KR/US/EMEA).
02 Product thinking
Co-worked with 2 PMs to consolidate the design solutions.
03 User experience & Prototyping
Designed and iterated information architecture, visual, and interaction experiences.
04 Design validation
Hosted user validations with high-fidelity prototypes with external clients from 3 regions (CN/JP/EMEA).
About CrossX portal
CrossX is an ads management service that Appier helps clients accurately advertise their products on the internet.
The product team intended to build an external portal for CrossX, that helps clients efficiently provide advertising materials for campaign onboarding.
CrossX portal aims to guide clients to complete integration settings step-by-step until they generate attribution links, and also assists clients in validating creative specs automatically.
With it, clients could streamline their campaign onboarding experience in a more save-time, explicit manner.
Sneak peek of design
The Background
Advertising is highly time-sensitive on the internet, and enterprise clients often aim to launch a campaign as soon as possible. However, third-party platform integration setting and providing creatives usually leads to back-and-forth communications with advertisers(Appier). Internally, streamlining these processes is crucial for revenue growth by saving over 15% in campaign onboarding lead time.
Problem Statement
We interviewed internal stakeholders to collect the use cases from their experience collaborating with clients during the campaign onboarding journey.
We identified 2 key themes of pain points commonly faced by clients:
01 MMP integration settings & tracking links
Clients find it hard to get the corresponding guidelines to do integration settings correctly
They need to switch between three places along with the process
They read guidelines/set up on the platform and make screenshots
Clients seldom set up settings correctly at once
02 Upload creatives
Clients couldn’t know if they provided the correct spec of creatives to Appier or not
They needed to wait for AM’s manual validation
After receiving AM's response, they may need to adjust creative sizesthrough the online crop tool to meet Appier’s requirements.
Design Iteration
Since both sales(BD) and account manager(AM) have more experience in collaborating with clients. We validated design assumptions with them at first, along with the process, in some parts we made two design options to verify the assumptions, or iterated the design to fulfill all collected use feedback.
03
Original assumption
Most clients are familiar with the settings, they can understand the steps effectively.
Modified assumption
Clients rarely need to change parameters, accounting for about 15%.
04
Upload Creative
Original assumption
Didn't consider the use cases of categorize the creatives and multiple target region for ads campaign.
Modified assumption
Raw materials should be categorized by material type, rather than creative type. Creatives should be packaged by region since campaigns are mainly launched with the same logic.
Design Deliverables
A streamlined onboarding experience
A landing page for the client to understand what task users are going to complete
Provide local language
Step-by-step integration setting
Combined integration guidelines with screenshots uploading, and tracking links together, provide a seamless flow for users to finish the integration settings in a single place.
A customized setting steps from the defined attribution rule on the discussed order, so that clients don't need to find the correct guideline manually.
Automatically validate tracking URL to confirm the setting correctness, and clients could modify it instantly.
Validate creatives spec automatically
When a user uploads a bundle of creatives, the system will automatically identify image sizes and categorize them into specific material types.
When any creative doesn’t meet Appier’s creative spec, the system will validate it:
If the image size is incorrect, the system will inform the client to fix it.
If the file size exceeds the limitation, the system will compress it automatically.
Provide on-time creative previews to help clients understand specific advertisement formats (Native, Native video) clearly.
User feedback
After iterating the design with internal users, I hosted user validation sessions to engage our clients in discussions about the features developed by our team. This approach yielded valuable real-world feedback, enabling us to promptly address concerns before implementation. The feedback was largely positive, the client measured this system would reduce 1-2 workdays on waiting for the responses, and she also expressed a desire for it to enhance the campaign onboarding experience compared to an offlined email communication.
Estimated Impact
In the current campaign onboarding flow, it was going to take approximately 6 days to help clients complete MMP integration settings and provide tracking links and creatives. After the product team evaluates the CrossX portal's value through both user interviews and investigation from existing use cases, it will save onboarding time by 30% which means saving at least 2.2 hours per campaign.