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Ad Monetization Platform for Publishers & Advertisers

My Role
Design Leadership
Product Direction & Strategy
End to End Design

Story

I joined PubMatic as Head of Design in 2012, and wasted no time in reshaping their entire product experience from ground up - for Publishers and Advertisers. My primary objective was to offer a clean and simple user interface for publishers to setup their campaigns, their marketplaces, ad placements and content strategy and for advertisers to make bidding happen effortlessly!

In 2015, I led design for a new analytics platform for Publishers to view their revenue, impressions and engagement metrics which was eventually also powered by Natural Language search.

Concept

What did we build?

Our objectives were to use publisher's data on their key performance metrics to tell them a story on their real time performance, impressions sold and the cost they were paying to the advertisers that bid on their content. PubMatic is a digital advertising technology company for premium content creators and it's platform empowers independent app developers and publishers to control and maximize their digital advertising businesses.

Timeline: Aug 2014 - June 2015

My Role

I was a hands on Product Design Director in PubMatic's Design team, reporting to the SVP of Product Management. Our global design teams were based out of Redwood City, New York and Pune, India.

Hands on Design

I worked on various features and concepts with two other designers (reporting to me) who lead the Report Builder and Notification features.

Problem

An Outdated Experience

Reporting and Insights had not updated its user experience since its launch in 2007. This was the first major overhaul in PubMatic’s history. Like many other advertising platforms, PubMatic had a problem — their data was everywhere, siloed, and accessible only to individual account managers.

The Design Challenge

Our users need to deal with a wide range of data sources, compare and contrast them, recall and explore new sources quickly and intuitively.

Multiple Sources of Reports / No Single Source of Truth
Research

Discovery

Understanding the Concept

The need had grown in recent years to create a new way to deal with the immense amounts of financial data of publishers or content creators being generated on ad-serving platforms.

Initial Field Studies

I partnered with our User Researcher and began the design process by interviewing as many people as time would allow. Time was short before a demo date at the Ad Revenue Conference in 2015.

Leading with Data

20

User Interviews

Programmatic Sales and Pricing Managers, Monetization & Inventory Managers, Director or Ad Solutions and Prog. Solutions were interviewed by our research team.

19k

Page Views

Insightful quantitative data was presented to us by the research team on which reports are being used most frequently, what filters should be by default, what KPIs do publishes love.

40

Call Reports / Week

Weekly reports from the Sales team also trickled down to us that provided great user feedback constantly.

Customers we interviewed

Competitive Analysis

Our list of compelling use cases were mapped in to our competitive landscape of products such as AdX, Index, MetaMarkets, Rubicon and other analytics and reporting platforms. We did a dot vote on the highest priority of features from the use cases that we needed to build.

Brain Writing

We don't know what we don't know

As part of our research plans and customer discussions, we held a per-customer Design Thinking exercise to to test our hypothesis, find out about their pain points, dot-vote on the highest priorities for them to complete their tasks, and target their "jobs to be done". We also had a few folks sketch out their ideal experiences. It was fun!

Sketching

"We Want Faster Horses!"

A snapshot of a sketch from a customer in our Crazy 8 exercise that helped generate ideas. He envisioned a 6 screen desk layout where he could see all performance metrics and dashboards.

Empathy

"Why do I need six reports to understand my KPIs?"

Media Manager at Spotify

"I want fresh data, not a day old."

Account Manager at Business Insider

Value Proposition

Why should we build Analytics?

To Power Productivity

Enable Sales Managers, Ad Traffickers, Inventory Managers (Publisher Profiles) to be more productive.

To provide Real time and Intelligent Data

Real-time performance and alert users on when their KPIs rise or fall, and give them minute by minute reporting.

Make it customizable & personalized Experience

Lay the widgets as you like, and provide “stickiness”, so the user interactions stay exactly the same when you log back on.

User Centered "Know me" Design

Follow a process of human centered design which wasn’t followed until 2015.

My Design Activities

Building the Brand

The Creative Marketing team worked on the guidelines that brought the PubMatic Brand to life across all communications: on screen, in print, and in person. They were built to maintain consistency in every application and ensure that the emotive story behind the brand was told at every touch-point.

And a Design System

I helped the Creative Director and her team build the PubMatic Product Design System which provided the structure and guidelines to create a consistent experience across the PubMatic products.

Challenge

A big part of our design process was to about validation with customers and then nailing the details, but speed to market was also key. Prototyping with InVision allowed us to iterate quickly, elevate quality, and ship fast.

Needing a Culture of Collaboration

A culture of leading by design was forming. Right from our CEO, Product leaders, subject matter experts, and all technical teams were part of the design process.

Green-Field Development

As a designer, building a brand new experience from scratch is always really exciting. Our amazing Analytics development team created a whole new front-end component library and back-end APIs for the system by the time our design team got on board and began discovery.

Patent Pending

Natural Language Processing

We partnered with a small startup called Barzer to build an extensive database of natural language phrases and the algorithm that was used to understand user behavior for our "Smart Bar". We have filed a patent for the overall technical design and workflow, as it was the first time used in an advertising platform.

Design Showcase

Publisher Revenue Dashboard

Building a Report

Natural Language Search

On the Go

TV Mode

Reactions

"I love the new dashboard on the PubMatic Seven platform, and love that how easy it is to get my fill rate, sales channel revenue and impressions and real time pricing."

Director of Programmatic Sales at Kayak

"The best part of it is that it can tell me where I’m going wrong, and what made my KPIs fall."

Account Manager at NBC

Launch at Ad Revenue Conference

We had a flourishing demo of the Analytics platform at the Ad Revenue Conference 2015 in October 13, 2015.