Private Marketplace
Led design and experience strategy to simplify campaign management for advertisers and publishers, unlocking a $3M business opportunity.
Overview
I led interaction design and UX strategy for the Private Marketplace experience, partnering closely with product, engineering, and customer success teams to reduce user friction and increase deal completion rates—unlocking a $3M revenue opportunity.
The Challenge
The company was facing high drop-off rates on its Private Marketplace (PMP) platform. Publishers—the primary users—were frequently abandoning the setup process and turning to their account reps for support. These customer success teams were spending extensive time troubleshooting, with many publishers eventually bypassing the platform altogether and relying solely on reps to set up deals. This shift led to decreased platform engagement and growing operational costs.
To address this, UX and Product partnered to investigate the root causes of abandonment and user frustration—speaking directly with customers and internal stakeholders to map pain points and inefficiencies.
My Role
I led the interaction design and UX strategy for the Private Marketplace experience. I collaborated closely with our cross-functional team of product manager, UI developers, backend engineers, and customer success reps.
🔎 Product Definition & Strategy: I worked on building an iterative strategy with our product manager to define the product scope, prioritize features, and establish the vision for launch and beyond.
🖊 User Research and Experience Design: We conducted user research and testing, which I then used to inform the journeys, wireframes, prototypes, and design specs.
👁🗨 Leadership: I championed design and systems thinking across cross-functional teams, while conducting design demos for senior leaders and executives during bi-weekly product steering meetings.
Discovery
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
I conducted in-depth interviews with ~30 stakeholders across the US, EMEA, and APAC to uncover key friction points. Clear themes began to emerge as I synthesized feedback across markets.
USER PERSONAS
From initial conversations with users, it became clear that different user groups approached the PMP deal workflow in distinct ways, depending on their role responsibilities. It was crucial to design an interaction model that was both flexible and intuitive for all user types.
Our user groups were categorized into internal and external users:
Internal Users: Customer Success Operations Managers (primary) and Account Executives (secondary)
External Users: Publishers, Advertisers, and Mediation Partners
To better understand these users and their needs, the UX team conducted a user persona exercise and defined two key personas—Karen and David. These personas helped to guide our design decisions, ensuring the experience was tailored to the unique goals, pain points, and workflows of each user type.
USER JOURNEY
To gain a comprehensive understanding of the deal workflow, I worked closely with internal users, product management, and my design team to facilitate a journey mapping exercise. This process helped us identify key pain points across the user experience and develop targeted solutions to address them.
COLLABORATION WITH PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & ENGINEERING
UX partnered closely with product management to define and prioritize key use cases. Engineers who had worked on the legacy product were included in early brainstorming sessions, providing valuable feedback on feasibility and edge cases. This early collaboration ensured a shared, comprehensive understanding of the entire user journey, aligning all teams toward a unified solution.
Process
I collaborated with the Product team to define four key phases in the private marketplace deal setup process:
PHASE 1: DEAL NEGOTIATION
Problem: One of the biggest challenges in the deal negotiation phase was the lack of transparency into a publisher’s inventory, with negotiations occurring through disconnected channels like emails and calls, leading to inefficiency.
Solution: To address this, we proposed a communication widget to centralize negotiations directly within the buyer's core platform, reducing the need for external communication channels. I designed a proof of concept (POC) to demonstrate the interaction between a demand-side platform (MediaMath) and a publisher ad server (Google DFP). Despite initial interest from clients, technical and security concerns led to deprioritizing the widget. Instead, the decision was made to leverage our existing alerting tool to manage the communication more effectively.
PHASE 2: DEAL CREATION
Problem: One of the biggest pain points from users was that our forms were long, complex, and overwhelming, making it difficult for them to navigate and take action quickly.
Goal: Through user interviews, we identified that users wanted a balance between power, features, and simplicity. They sought enough options to handle specific needs, but also a streamlined process that didn't require extensive learning.
Rethinking Flow: From Wizard to Flexible Sequencing
I initially explored a wizard-style flow. It offered structure and clarity, and I expected it would help reduce early overwhelm — especially for newer users. But I had a strong hunch it might be too rigid for our power users.
To test that, I built a quick prototype. The feedback confirmed the concern: users wanted flexibility. They skipped around, needed to backtrack, and found the strict linearity frustrating.
That insight made the path forward clear — what we needed wasn’t stricter sequencing, but smarter pacing. It led me to explore a more flexible model — one that provided guidance without locking users into a fixed path.
CHOSEN DESIGN — Progressive Disclosure
As the lead designer, I developed a design pattern using progressive disclosure to simplify the form layout. Initially, users were shown only the most important options, with secondary features disclosed upon request. This approach allowed users to focus on core tasks while minimizing complexity. I also conducted a content audit with product and customer success teams to eliminate unnecessary aspects of the workflow. Additionally, we removed the requirement of creating a product before deal creation, streamlining the process and embedding inventory details directly into the deal creation page. The result was a 75% reduction in time spent completing a deal.
To address the challenge of balancing simplicity and flexibility, I leaned into progressive disclosure — a simple yet powerful principle where only essential fields appear upfront, with more advanced options revealed as needed.
This approach reduced cognitive load, accelerated setup, and supported both novice and power users — offering clarity and control without overwhelming the interface.
To validate this direction, I began by prototyping low-fidelity flows to explore structure and sequencing. These early sketches weren’t about visuals — they were about rhythm: how information unfolded, when decisions were introduced, and whether users felt supported or stuck along the way.
This helped me determine where to split the experience into manageable sections, what details could be deferred until later, and how to guide users through complexity with just the right balance of flexibility and structure.
After testing structure and sequencing in low fidelity, I translated those insights into a redesigned form experience.
The original interface was long, dense, and visually flat — presenting every input upfront, regardless of relevance. This made deal creation feel more complex than necessary.
To achieve this, I:
Separated required and optional fields to establish hierarchy
Grouped related inputs to minimize context switching
Used defaults to streamline repetitive workflows — especially for users setting up similar deals
Instead of front-loading everything, we sequenced the experience — revealing just what users needed at the right time, while keeping key decisions visible.
This wasn’t just a visual refresh — it was a deliberate effort to reduce cognitive load. Especially for users like Karen, who needed structure and reassurance to move through complexity with confidence.
PHASE 3: DEAL TARGETING
Problem: The existing setup for targeting controls was complex, lacked visibility, and did not present large datasets in a user-friendly manner.
Goal: Users wanted a simple way to scan and customize audience targeting, with advanced controls like inclusion/exclusion of specific targeting values.
Solution: To address these needs, I created a consolidated view of targeting dimensions, providing a summary of selected controls. I also ensured clear messaging on targeting availability based on account types, with intuitive toggle controls for blocking or excluding certain options. This improvement made it easier for users to navigate and adjust their targeting settings, enhancing the overall targeting experience.
FINAL DESIGNS — Making Complexity Usable
Targeting involved a series of small but high-impact design decisions. The module contained over a dozen individual controls — each effectively its own micro-project, with distinct logic, edge cases, and usability risks.
The final designs included geo, domain, and day-part targeting — three of the most information-dense parts of the experience. Rather than simplifying these features into oversimplified inputs, I focused on presenting complexity in a way that felt navigable, legible, and trustworthy, particularly for power users.
I was responsible for every layer of this experience: mapping backend logic to user interactions, designing patterns for progressive disclosure, and defining how validation and error states appeared without breaking flow.
The goal was to make even the most advanced deal configurations feel clear and approachable — giving users confidence and control throughout the setup process.
PHASE 4: DEAL OPTIMIZATION
Problem: Users lacked the necessary information to troubleshoot issues, and the error messages presented in the UI were confusing, making it hard for them to proceed with optimizations.
Solution: We improved error communication by providing clear, contextual messages and actionable guidance. Additionally, I helped create a documentation wiki and guided videos to support users in making informed decisions. To further assist users, UX and Product teams developed a troubleshooting tool that enabled publishers to track performance issues, identify revenue losses, and provide step-by-step guidance to optimize their campaigns. This solution empowered users to more confidently manage their deal optimizations and reach their campaign goals.
Impact
The project, which began in May 2018 and was completed in January 2019, delivered significant improvements in user experience and business outcomes.
We measured success through KPIs and feedback collected from in-person chats, Salesforce reports, Google Analytics, and NPS surveys. The results were highly positive, with notable improvements across key metrics:
The streamlined deal creation process, enhanced error handling, and troubleshooting tools contributed to a marked reduction in user frustration and support requests, while increasing both deal creation and user satisfaction.
This project was a reminder that the most impactful design happens when you’re not just shaping the interface — but shaping the system around it.