Wise.blue
Overview
Company: Aleph
Timeframe: 2022–2025
Role: Product Design Director (contract)
Note: Published with client’s consent.
Background
Aleph is the world’s largest ad reseller partner, helping brands in 150+ countries advertise on TikTok, X, Microsoft, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, Google, and more. Its campaign management platform, Wise.blue, launched for Twitter in 2018 and ran thousands of campaigns for hundreds of clients.
A group of campaign managers found a way to export data from Twitter’s Ads Manager to Excel, add rows, and upload the file back to batch-create complex campaign structures. That hack became the idea behind Wise.blue Next: live campaign management in a spreadsheet UI, bundled with a long-overdue front-end overhaul.
Results
- Efficiency: The Supergrid cut complex campaign management tasks from hours to minutes and became the platform’s flagship feature
- Business: The redesigned platform helped secure new partnership deals with media partners (details under NDA)
Ownership
I was responsible for leading product design from discovery to launch and beyond in a hands-on player/coach role.
Show individual contributions
- Designed the Supergrid campaign management UX+UI
- Redesigned the reporting and back-office administration UX+UI
- Redesigned the platform architecture of entities, roles, and permissions
- Ran a prototype validation and participatory design workshop
- Ran the Supergrid alpha usability testing
The role also included redefining the product strategy with leadership for the 0→1 overhaul and directing all research and development efforts, including migration planning and the roadmap. After launch, I continued to own the product design function, leading a team of two UX+UI designers while staying hands-on.
Wise.blue Next for Twitter internal teaser — I wrote the script and provided creative direction
“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
Ideation and prototyping
The main worry with the Supergrid idea was its total width. Before committing to developing it, we needed a realistic sense of the user experience, interaction design challenges, and how much we could compress the horizontal scroll.
First we made a proof of concept using a production data dump inside Google Sheets for our own assessments. Then we developed a horizontal prototype and ran a participatory design workshop with campaign managers in Riga to test the concept’s usability and deepen our understanding of their workflows and methods.
More about product discovery process
Supergrid structure drill-down schematics
Spreadsheet as the app UI
The flight board enables a side-by-side comparison of multiple accounts (by the same advertiser), which is not possible with any platform native ad manager tools.
Expandable entities and in-line editing drastically accelerate the workflow by reducing the number of clicks compared to the typical in-and-out drill-down interaction pattern.
Color-coded entities keep users oriented in two dimensions and make data more readable. While the anchor links enable horizontal scroll without a trackpad when using a keyboard and a mouse with a secondary screen.
Entity anchor links
The UI enables four chart panels, which can be reordered and collapsed to allow more room for complex spreadsheet operations.
Each chart panel can display up to six KPIs at once and supports dimension breakdowns and chart type customization.
Batch creation and editing work in a horizontal table or a vertical wizard. Subeditors take structured data and media inside a single cell, and error bubbles link to every faulty cell.
Power-user features
Flash Fill brings the essential power of Excel into the app. Smart copy-paste enables input of structured data from campaign plan spreadsheets used to align with clients. Together, they make previously tedious tasks a matter of seconds.
Smart copy-paste with structured-data formatting and API matching
Flash Fill: to provide essential powers of Excel in the app, we reimplemented the famous feature for the most common pattern operations.
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).
Naming macros enable them to generate names by using "$variables" in the name column in combination with the Flash Fill feature to automate the above procedure.
Naming macros demonstration
Keyboard shortcuts follow Google Sheets, Notion, and Airtable conventions on Windows and Mac, with custom combinations only where needed.
Reporting
An in-app report builder pulls raw data and provides an ID for the Google Sheets add-on. This enables campaign managers to merge data with third-party conversion trackers, create pivot tables and charts, transfer them into Google Slides for final client reports, and refresh them with one button every week.
Notification center
A delivery system decides whether each notification appears as a real-time toast, waits in the sidebar, or goes out by email when the user is offline, based on an inventory of every action ranked by importance. User settings control relevance and interruptions.
More from the project
Timelapse of rapid prototyping with code
Supergrid Google Sheets proof of concept・Data model inventory・Campaign lifecycle and typical process・ICP and personas problem-solution map・Jobs to be done matrix・Usability testing results and actionable insights
Various user interface sketches
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