Wise.blue

Context

Company: Aleph
Timeframe: 2022–2025
Role: Product Design Director (contract)
Note: Published with client’s consent.

Aleph is the largest ad reseller partner in the world, operating in over 150 countries. They enable brands in developing markets to advertise on TikTok, X, Microsoft, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, Google, et al.

Wise.blue is their owned and operated campaign management platform. The original product was built in 2018 for Twitter and ran thousands of campaigns for hundreds of clients.

Mission

The product team discovered a hack: some campaign managers would export all campaign data from Twitter’s native Ads Manager as an Excel file, add rows for new campaigns, and upload it back to batch-create complex campaign/group/ad structures.

This became the foundational idea for the Next generation of the product: live campaign management with a spreadsheet UI. The leadership bundled the new product strategy with a long-overdue front-end overhaul.

Contributions

I was responsible for product design from discovery to launch of the redesign and beyond.

Hands-on contributions:

• Designed the Supergrid campaign management UX+UI
• Redesigned the reporting and back-office administration UX+UI
• Redesigned platform architecture of entities, roles, and permissions
• Ran a prototype validation and participatory design workshop
• Ran the Supergrid alpha usability testing

The Next overhaul was executed as a 0→1 and required I work with the leadership on redefining product strategy. I directed all efforts of the research and development phase including migration planning and the roadmap. After the launch, I continued to own product design function of leading a team of two UX+UI designers and remaining hands-on.

Results

1. The Supergrid cut complex campaign management tasks from hours to minutes and became the platform’s flagship feature;
2. The redesigned platform helped secure new partnership deals with media partners. (Details subject to NDA.)

“Natan’s methodical approach to design surfaced invaluable user-research insights, addressed the complexities of an innovative GUI, and successfully led the entire team through a 0-1 marathon by creating a clear roadmap and specifications. He was crucial in helping me align executive stakeholders and bring the product idea to life. I look forward to the opportunity to work with him again in the future.”
— Davor Strehar, former Aleph Global CTO

Highlights

Supergrid rapid prototyping

Our main worry was Supergrid’s total width. Before committing to development, we needed to get a sense of the horizontal scroll experience and assess how much we could compress it with label abbreviations and other UI design methods.

The UX team used Google Sheets to import a platform data dump and create a Supergrid proof of concept with realistic data.

Once we got a grip on the edges, we took on the challenge of creating an inventory of all the data columns, their properties, and dependencies.

The next milestone was rendering the entire data model as a read-only Supergrid, and determining optimal views and UI micro-interactions needed to display, navigate, and make sense of enormous amounts of data.

After locking in place the over-arching UX+UI design of the Supergrid, the lead dev and I worked on solving several tough micro-interaction challenges by rapid prototyping with code over the course of the next month.

We iterated with hourly mockup-to-code cycles, together scrutinizing ideas, assessing the UX of implementation experiments, and weighing trade-offs until we solved all key usability areas.

Now we had a fully functional prototype. The app front-end was there; it just had no back-end to store data. However, we could simulate the UX of all key campaign management functionality with it. It was time to expose our assumptions to real users.

User research, usability testing, and participatory design

Commitment to allocating resources for months-long MVP development was conditional on product validation.

Would the spreadsheet UI be too abstract for users who are used to wizard-based campaign creation and classic app UI with record lists and entity detail pages?

How intuitive is the Supergrid UI? Where do our solutions break? Where does input data come from, and in what form?

We exposed the prototype to users. Usability testing validated and sharpened the hypothesis. Users felt at home with the spreadsheet UI paradigm and wanted more. Focus group revealed that campaign managers ran their operations using standardized “campaign map” spreadsheets artifact and copy-pasting data from it into ad platforms.

We also learned about the methods, reasoning, and requirements governing each step of the campaign lifecycle, which were crucial for fine-tuning the implementation and roadmap decisions.

Campaign management Supergrid

With product validation and a fully functional prototype in place, the design team deep-dived into UX+UI design, streamlining workflows and addressing feature requests where applicable. Meanwhile the engineering team refactored the Supergrid code to production-ready standards.

To make monitoring of complex campaign structures easier, and make sense of reporting data across multiple systems, campaign managers developed a practice of naming entities by their key settings and values (e.g. targeting). A universal peculiarity of the AdOps world. They often prepare text in advance of campaign creation by copy-pasting the variable parts and using spreadsheets Flash Fill to achieve all permutations.

Platform architecture & admin UI

Discovery surfaced foundational deficiencies in the platform’s data entities, roles, and permissions. The legacy platform allowed multiple external ad accounts per Wise.blue ad account, producing asymmetrical campaign structures and frequent user confusion, and it could not fully support agency-as-client workflows or reporting aggregated across advertisers and accounts.

We redesigned the architecture for data symmetry and introduced Agency Admin and Advertiser Admin roles plus a Team entity, supporting bulk access management and cross-entity reporting regardless of organizational complexity.

Reporting

In addition to the in-app report builder, which enables users to pull raw data, we created a Google Sheets add-on. It enables campaign managers to merge Wise.blue data with 3rd-party conversion trackers, create pivot tables, generate charts, link them within Google Slides reports for clients, and automate all steps for periodic updates with a refresh button.

Notification center

We worked on a notification delivery system that decides whether a notification should be displayed as a toast in real time, added to the sidebar backlog in the background, or sent via email when the user is offline. Including user settings for more control over relevancy and allowed interruptions.

Credits

VP Product Management: M. Pangerc
Eng. manager: S. Križanič, D. Arh
PMM: A. Johnson
Architecture: T. Todorovski, A. Primc
UX+UI design: S. Rotter, A. Gjorsheska
PM: B. Belovinov, S. Kukičar, G. Romavh
Scrum: A. Naskovska, K. Velichkovska, U. Simčič
Eng. lead: Ž. Klemenčič, A. Sušnik
FE: N. Ilievski, S. Selimoski, V. Todorovski, E. Poljšak, R. Aminov, A. Fajfar
BE: Z. Čičak, E. Šestić Vejzagić, A. Šupuk, D. Tominec, A. Alič, S. Buljević
QA: V. Kalachevski, H. Genas, A. Alyssa Leden
Data science: J. Hladnik