Design for a Robust Ad-Builder Suite for Merchant dashboard

Role: Lead Product Designer (IC Lead)

Team: 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineering Manager, 5 Engineers

Scope: End-to-end design of a robust ad-builder suite that allowed merchants manage ads and track orders from customers

Key Challenges: Top merchants juggled WhatsApp and Excel because our consumer-focused dashboard hid bulk actions and real‑time KPIs. leading to lost sales and high churn of merchants

Impact: New ad-builder led to increased ad sales by 55%, growing revenue by 20% for 2024 Q2

We aimed to fix the broken experience and address attrition of new merchants, who have been using manual offline platforms like WhatsApp closed groups and excel sheets to track the ads they list and sell on our platform. The existing dashboard was built for merchants who switched from customers to start selling assets at larger volumes. With businesses onboarding with their corporate profiles, there was an urgent need of reliable ads management built into the dashboard.

I collated the merchant support ticket logs from support team and summarized the reported shared challenges in Notion. I setup a brainstorming session with the engineering and marketing team, using How Might We statements to frame the key problems we needed solutions to. After votes based on time, effort and impact, I developed a few hypotheses to guide the ideation.

Increased errors in setting up ads on the existing dashboard due to hidden views of confusing experience

Lack of visibility on current market conditions, leading to inaccurate ads parameters

No central way to reply to ads from multiple customers, or setting a general trade terms to avoid misaligned expectations from customers

There was a clear need to create an easily-accessible ad builder from the dashboard and provide visibility on the orders that customer have created on these ads; all from the dashboard

From usability tests with a closed group of merchants, we iterated the key information to highlight, most indicating metrics like: active ads, health of order fulfilment (completion rate and average time) as their key business data points

The newly designed ad-builder was a 3-step module that segmented the information into ad type, payment details and auto-response; all editable within the builder, making it convenient for merchants to manage ads

Increased ad sales by 55%, growing revenue by 20% for 2024 Q2

Reduced ad errors by 70%

Admin widgets extended our design system, ensuring consistency and cutting QA time by 25%