Private Marketplace
An invitation-only marketplace for advertisers and publishers to manage their digital advertising businesses, where advertisers can reach target audiences in brand-safe, premium environments.
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
Wearing my user researcher hat, 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.
Solution: 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.
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.
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:
Time taken to successfully get a deal up and running: ⬇︎75%
Deal completion rate: ⬆︎32%
User satisfaction (NPS): ⬆︎8 points
Number of support requests: ⬇︎40%
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.