InMobi Deals Platform

The Challenge

InMobi suffered from repetitive development cycles to fix usability and technical issues with products that were not meeting user expectations. The new Deals Platform needed to avoid these issues.

The Solution

I built the business’s first Product Design team and implemented processes that put more focus on user needs, thoughtful user flows, and modernized UI. We used these processes to design a beta version of the company’s first self-serve product for demand side customers, the Deals Platform.

My Roles

I managed a globally distributed Product Design team, overseeing all UX/UI and research.

Ad agencies rely on InMobi’s targeting for their biggest brands.

Background

Existing in the highly complex and technical adtech industry, InMobi has enjoyed immense success by prioritizing speedy output from engineers. However, widespread bugs and confusing user experiences were becoming all too common.

Introducing Design Process to InMobi

This resulted in product managers, engineers, account managers, and product marketers often scrambling to identify and fix issues affecting customers. The company’s focus on engineering output was creating more work for everyone.

To address this, my team introduced new processes that more clearly defined project goals and reduced the need for adhoc fixes. Instead of relying solely on requirements documents, we began collaboratively documenting hypotheses and problem statements, running user journey workshops, conducting user research, and defining QA processes for every project.

Journey Maps

By talking with real users, we were able to uncover how our products fit into their lives, including pain points and expectations.

Heuristic Evaluations

When iterating on large complex features, we used detailed heuristic evaluations to find areas in need of UX improvements.

Remote Worshops

I facilitated globally distributed remote workshops, including design-led "How Might We" sessions, improving collaboration.

Friction For The Business & Customers

My team's highlight project was creating a new platform for customers to manage their ad deals. Before this, customers had no opportunity to create or edit deals themselves, leading to a lengthy process involving multiple InMobi employees.

The Old Way of Managing Deals

Customers would work with InMobi account managers to determine ad inventory that they wanted to target in their deal. Then the account manager would log a request in Salesforce and send it to an engineer who would create or update the deal. This process could take as much as three days to complete, which was often far too long for our customers.

Goals For The New Platform

Our primary goal was to create a product that would eliminate this three day turnaround time and allow customers to instantaneously manage their deals.

Research

To remove the risk of ambiguity that comes with new product development, we started with user research. We partnered with account managers to recruit real customers for hour-long remote interviews that I facilitated. This guided us to uncover three key user needs, which became UX priorities.

I conducted remote interviews with customers to uncover their needs and pain points.

Participant’s appearance is obscured for privacy.

Key User Needs

Granular Targeting Options

Customers valued InMobi’s unique ability to create highly customizable targeting for ad deals, so our product had to present extensive targeting options without overwhelming or confusing users.

Inventory Recommendations

Customers believed that no one knew InMobi's ad inventory better than InMobi. They expected InMobi to provide tailored recommendations for revenue-driving inventory.

Speed & Ease of Use

Customers complained that some competitor products were slow and difficult to use. Speed and ease of use when creating deals was seen as a basic requirement.

Quotes from User Research:

“If we have the option to target what we need fast, for sure we’ll increase spends.”

“Sometimes clients have budgets remaining at the end of the month or quarter and they need to get rid of them today."

“I have to open it and it takes 2 days. This opportunity is gone. If I can go and open it myself, obviously it saves time.”

“If it’s user friendly, we’re going to use it more”

User Roles & Permissions

For our beta launch, the Deals Platform needed to serve 4 user roles that we used as loose personas. Each role was given specific permissions, based on what that person needed to accomplish in the product.

Customer

Customers were the most important user role. These users were employees of DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) that needed to quickly set up or edit deals.

They were given permission to view, create, and edit deals, but some non-essential targeting and deal setup controls were not visible to them. These controls were reserved for InMobi employees because they were either technical or only applied to InMobi's internal deal tracking.

Internal Admin

A few InMobi users on the Solutions Engineering team were given this user role. To preserve a closed beta phase, only they had permission to create new accounts, invite users, and delete deals. They also had the ability to view all accounts via an account switcher feature.

Internal Editor

InMobi Account Managers and AdOps members were given permission the same permissions as customers, but with all targeting and deal setup controls. This allowed them to fully assist customers, if needed.

Internal Viewer

Some employees at InMobi would benefit from viewing existing deals, but had no need to create or edit. Special view-only flows were created for them.

User Flows

We began by designing the most foundational user flows for the Beta: creating new deals, creating deals with recommended inventory (Called “Curated Packages”), and editing deals.

"Create New Deal" flows were validated flows with a usability study with internal users.

A highly abbreviated user flow example is shown here.
Download the full user flow to see all details and pathways.

Card Sorting to Organize Fields

To ensure our targeting options were organized intuitively, we ran card sorting exercises with users. This helped us organize 32 targeting fields into 5 logical categories: Geography, Inventory, Audiences, Device Settings, and Integrations.

Design System Revamp

InMobi’s design system, Chromos, is powerful and expansive, supporting the UX/UI for five B2B and internal products. However, it was also a hodgepodge of disconnected codebases, incomplete or inaccurate documentation, accessibility issues, and underwhelming usability. Additionally, the system had a robust set of components, color tokens, and font tokens, but many of them lacked specific use-cases, resulting in unnecessary bloat.

It was overdue for cleanup.

Process

We began by documenting what components existed, which of 3 codebases they lived in, and whether they had design documentation. In order to create a single source of truth, we migrated components from scattered Zeplin and Sketch files to Figma.

Bringing Updates to Existing Products

We used design system updates as a foundation to rethink what our products could achieve for users. For instance, we re-conceptualized the Home page of our product for app developers with a greater focus on their performance data and marketing of new features.