During my extended relationship with KERV, I designed several products as part of their wide portfolio of advertising tools. KERV's main offering uses AI to capture metadata from video content and generate next-generation advertisements. Their platform connects product catalogs to video content and serves viewers highly relevant ads. To make their platform work, they use several tools across many stakeholders, including their internal team, their customers (production studios, such as Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, etc.), and the end users who view the content and ads and potentially make purchases. I helped to create their company-wide design language, as well as to design their flagship products.

When I began work with KERV, they already had a successful business producing highly effective advertisements that drove strong conversion rates. However, creating these ads involved a heavily manual, time-consuming workflow that impacted both the internal team and their customers. Although some tools were in place, they lacked key capabilities, often forcing users to adapt them for tasks beyond their intended purpose. The primary challenge was to streamline this complex process and deliver a more efficient, powerful solution.

To better understand the problems at hand, I began by conducting discovery research. There were no clear requirements already in place, so I extracted this information through team conversations, reading available documents, and analyzing the existing tools.

I spoke to members of every team involved in the operations chain to conduct thorough user interviews. This included people responsible for setting up creatives and ad campaigns. At times, I was also able to engage with KERV’s customers and get first-hand knowledge about their pain points and aspirations.

The interviews helped us construct as-is user journeys, which showcased the current experience, along with its inefficiencies and opportunities. These artifacts were instrumental in getting alignment and guiding the requirements for my effort.

With the research complete, I was ready to work with the KERV team to construct a design strategy. The objectives were to simplify the operations and streamline the product pipeline. Since the existing tools felt disconnected and had no clear place, I had to make significant changes. Our efforts included the following:

HOLISTIC APPROACH Since there were various users for the different aspects of the process, I had to think about the big picture and ensure that our product strategy worked coherently across users.

AUTOMATING MANUAL TASKS I designed new features and tools that automated tasks previously done manually by team members and customers. This was a large multiproject effort, which required us to look at every step of the journey and methodically Introduce updates.

IMPROVING CONSISTENCY One of our strategic philosophies was to improve the consistency across our processes and design patterns. This helped reduce learning time for new team members, as well as reduce operational overhead.

STRATEGIC INCENTIVES INVESTMENT I aligned with the company's strategic plan for revenue growth and ensured that the new platform would double down on the current investments. This included adding new products as well as expanding the functionality of the AI engine.

REDUCING DEPENDENCIES As part of my discovery process, I identified dependencies on 3rd party tools and services that were increasing our costs and limiting our flexibility. I cut down on those by automating steps and building in-house tools that worked better for our use cases.

I continued my design process by crafting a clean design language based on Google’s Material Design. This helped us unite the different pieces of the KERV strategy into one cohesive whole. With the language at hand, I designed the different tools that served our users along the journey. I worked tirelessly to make the new tools simple and intuitive, enabling them to reduce the time and friction it takes to complete tasks.

Through my collaboration with KERV, I successfully redesigned their visual language, transformed their entire product portfolio, and played a pivotal role in shaping their product strategy. My initial engagement evolved into a multi-year partnership, allowing us to deliver sustained value and make a significant impact on their platform. It was incredibly rewarding to work alongside the KERV team and help them achieve meaningful growth. Here are some of the kind words I received from the team: