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 allows merchants to manage ads and track orders from customers
Key Challenges: Merchants juggled between WhatsApp groups and manual ad tracking because the consumer-focused dashboard was limited for managing ads for sales, 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 the attrition of new merchants by 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 customer profiles to start selling assets at larger volumes. These merchants needed a reliable ad management system built into the dashboard at scale.
I collated the merchant support ticket logs from the support team and summarised the reported shared challenges in Notion. I set up interviews and user research with merchants and the merchant ops team on the support side, to understand pain points around ad creation leading to errors and missing on large trades. I mapped these in a pain point matrix in Figjam, allowing the team to identify when and where merchants encounter friction and frustration and noting the severity of the issue and how many merchants are affected.
I set up 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.
Some key problems I noted:
Increased errors in setting up ads on the existing dashboard due to hidden views of a confusing experience
Lack of visibility on current market conditions, leading to inaccurate ad parameters
No central way to reply to ads from multiple customers, or set general trade terms to avoid misaligned expectations from customers
Opportunity
There was a clear need to create an easily-accessible ad builder from the dashboard and provide visibility on the orders that customers have made on these ads, all from the dashboard
Ideation & Wireframes
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
Ideation & Wireframes
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
Ideation & Wireframes
We'd successfully made ad creation a seamless workflow: accessible and intuitive. Yet, we felt like we could save them one less click with delight, especially for bigger merchants with a sophisticated staff, so we added menu shortcuts, without breaking the experience for regular (less tech-savvy)users: A for Ads, O for Orders, P for profile; these were the most visited screens and flows for them––their"bread and butter!"
Outcomes
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 %
Ugo Ifezue
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