Rubicon Project
is an ad-tech company in Los Angeles. Their automated advertising platform is used by the world’s leading publishers to transact with top brands worldwide, enabling them to reach more than 1 billion consumers.
When I came on board as their Lead UX designer, the platform was seven years old and a conglomeration of inconsistent UIs and experiences. Leading the design team, I was tasked with doing a comprehensive UX audit and redesigning the entire platform (18 apps), while also working on a new flagship application on an aggressive timeline.
When I first joined the company, the platform had 18 applications. However, navigating through this plethora of applications proved to be a usability nightmare. Hence, one of our top priorities became revamping the platform's information architecture and navigation system, aiming to establish more streamlined user flows.
My primary focus was to determine the most effective approach for achieving goals and completing tasks within each specific application. To accomplish this, I diligently crafted a range of task flows, meticulously designing interactions that would optimize efficiency and facilitate the swift accomplishment of user objectives.
As a proponent of human-centered design , I typically start the design process with mapping experiences, creating personas and empathy maps.
It's all about ensuring customer alignment through mapping journeys.
The customer experience map for this application analyzes its four primary components.
Based on comprehensive user research, it illustrates customers' emotions, thoughts, and experiences as they engage with the product. This user journey analysis informed the product's design by identifying critical areas for improvement, allowing us to enhance the overall experience and reduce friction points.
As part of my design process, I created wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to review and gather feedback on layouts and interactions with my team. The following is a small sampling of wireframes I created to explore various application designs. After design reviews, user testing and validation, these wireframes were iterated on before we moved to the next stage.
I created limited-functionality prototypes for user testing. After testing with five users, I would iterate on the designs, prioritizing easy-of-use and optimizing for the best usability. This phase is all about customer alignment and optimizing the user experience.
The optimized design reduced the amount of time users would spend setting up proposals on the platform.
As part of the platform UX redesign and to ensure a consistent user experience, I created a design system, a UI styleguide and a comprehensive component library. These valuable resources empowered diverse development and design teams to deliver uniform and seamless user experiences throughout the platform.
A selection of final UI designs of various applications on the platform ready for development.
The result was an improved user experience, as well as positive feedback from customers and company stakeholders alike.
The company realized significant cost savings as a direct result of the UX redesign due to fewer support calls. We achieved increased customer loyalty, and boosted the company's net promoter score (NPS).
We increased word-of-mouth referrals, realized significant productivity gains, and increased performance and efficiency—which translated into cost savings both externally and internally.
I learned how to communicate more effectively with product and engineering teams in order to achieve a shared understanding. Working under severe time and resource constraints, I outlined which areas to prioritize in order to create better usability of the products, and subsequently boost the UX on the platform.
As I performed extensive user research and testing, wireframing, prototyping, and visual design on this project I learned a lot about following proper steps in the UX design process in order to achieve the best results. Along with the need to think systematically and establish a standardized set of tools for the design team, the necessity of crafting a component library, a platform styleguide, and design library made me a better designer.
