2020-2021
Yandex Direct
Mobile app for Instagram influencers
About the product
Yandex.Direct is a biggest advertising service in Eastern Europe.
My role
Staff product designer, individual contributor.
Main project goal
To win Instagram marketing budgets and test the hyposises.
Discovery
Background
In 2018 the company noticed an increase in the share of marketing budgets for social media, particularly Instagram.The major shift was among the small business cohort, which comprised 80% of live accounts on the platform and generated over 30% of revenue.st advertising service.
Challenge
Yandex Direct was optimized for professional advertisers. The average time for an unprofessional user to start a first campaign was 4 hours. They also churn a lot. Besides we didn’t have a mobile version, which small business owners were requesting.
Goals and objectives
Win social media marketing budgets and return the audience.
Decrease the time of the first campaign creation to 1 minute.
Increase the number of clients prolonging the promotion.
Make Yandex Direct perceived as a social media budget distributor.
Problem definition
User interviews
We invited 12 people from solo entrepreneurs and small business cohorts to understand what they value in Instagram promotions and what is missing for them in Yandex Direct.
We asked users how they run the business on social media, plan marketing budgets, choose the ad platform and why, create visuals, and so on.
Users praised Instagram for the most accessible campaign creation flow.
Users wanted a way to monitor their campaign performance on mobile, because they often on the go.
I helped to shape the moderation guide, led interviews and analysed the results.
Scoping
Based on research insights, pushed-down deadlines, and long release circles in the professional platform team, we decided to create a new mobile product for ad creation and management.
To narrow down the scope for the pilot, I conducted a series of workshops with relevant stakeholders.
Stakeholder workshops' results
Only one ad type for the pilot — banner ad.
4 steps ad creation: visual banner builder, geography, audience and budget.
Limited ad insights: reach, clicks, audience, spent.
I helped to prepare workshop setups and converted the results to user journey and main use cases.
Solution design
Design spring
To rapidly create a prototype, we cleared the schedule for a week for me as a designer, product manager, content designer, and two developers.
During the sprint, we defined the information architecture and navigation and created a semi-programmed prototype for usability tests.
The prototype we tested was based on the existing UI components.
Some process screens.
Usability test
We showed the prototype to 5 users during moderated usability tests in the Yandex UX lab and ask them what do they think about it. We were particularly interested in the perception of a budget screen and insights.
The overall feedback was positive.
Users didn't needed manual budget input, they okay with packages we suggest.
Users complained about the small size of elements on the screen.
Execution
Mobile design system theme
On usability tests, users mention uncomfortable sizes of UI elements. But we could not create a new design system for the pilot because of time constraints.
So we made a customised theme for the UI-kit and increased paddings and font sizes in the CSS without changing initial versions.
I defined paddings and text size for all UI components.
Final designs
On usability tests, users mention uncomfortable sizes of UI elements. But we could not create a new design system for the pilot because of time constraints so we went forward with the theme hack.
