Badger Advertising | Affiliate Marketing

Role Overview

I initially joined Badger Advertising as an hourly UX Consultant, helping design the v2 experience behind an internal product used to manage 1000s of Facebook accounts. After running a high-level competitive analysis, the product manager and I realized that there was a gap in the market. Facebook's Business Manager did its job of serving the "mom & pop shops" as well as its large enterprise level clients, but failed at meeting the needs of small to mid-sized agencies who were struggling to run successful marketing campaigns on Facebook. After voicing this insight to the CEO, the product manager and I were given time & resources to pivot our strategy to building a SaaS platform rather than an internal product. Along with this pivot, the Product Manager and I were both brought on full-time with myself as the Chief Design Officer.

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User(s)

• Media Buyers: team members who manage Facebook campaigns

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Strategy

• Identify the biggest pain points and opportunities for improvement within the current system by shadowing the media buyers.
• Hold a clarity canvas session to gain alignment and capture the essence of the project within a 1-pager.
• In conjunction with product manager, media buyers, and software engineers, create a story map with "slices" that indicate iterative releases based on outcomes from an effort & value exercise.
• Create an MVP prototype while identifying assumptions to test and validate.
• Build / Measure / Learn

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Pain Points

• Due to lack of tracking & reporting around the performance of Campaigns, Ad sets, and Ads on Facebook, media buyers were mostly relying on their intuition to make decisions around budget management.
• There were 3 different systems to interact with in order to create and manage a single campaign.
• Trust in the existing system was low. Failed API calls caused an asynchronous experience between the internal product, Badger Manager, and Facebook's Business Manager.

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Clarity Canvas

• When starting a new project, I always like to use the clarity canvas to gain alignment within the team. It helps us identify the following at the on-set of a project so that no one is caught off-guard half way into design & development:
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• Problem
• Solution
• Key Metrics
• Unique Value Proposition
• Unfair Advantage
• Channels
• Customer Segments & Early Adopters
• Cost Structure
• Revenue Stream

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Story Map

Story mapping is a visual way to capture the work at hand while creating empathy for the customers the product is looking to serve. It helps team members understand who they're creating the product for and why it is that we're creating it this way. I facilitated the story mapping session at Badger Advertising with each sprint to make sure the voice of our customers was being heard, recognized, and prioritized accordingly.

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Prototype

I created an interactive prototype of Badger Manager v2 using Figma, tackling just the stories within the first release. This prototype was then used to test with in-house media buyers to make sure it met their needs. See the prototype here.

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Final Thoughts

As the first UX professional joining the team, I was able to see a lot of opportunities for improvement. Today, development has started around the high-fidelity mockups & prototypes that were heavily tested and validated along the way with in-house Media Buyers.

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