Bulk Entity Updater
Who is Keywee?
Keywee is managed service that offers publishers and marketers a new approach to content distribution and performance measurement.
What Makes Keywee unique?
Each content distribution strategy has its own campaign, and over time the requirements for a content distribution campaign can change. When the requirements change, the ads, ad-sets and campaigns in Facebook need to be updated to reflect the new settings, otherwise the campaigns could be promoting to undesired audiences.
Roles and Responsibilities
Lead the product definition and research as product manager.
Did the user experience design including user flows, wireframes and mockups.
The Challenge
For many reasons the settings of ads in a Facebook content marketing campaign could fall out of alignment with the settings of the campaign they live in.
Many of these misalignments resulted in customer refunds, costing the company tens of thousands of dollars due to human error.
The Process
Research
First I researched how other platform solve the problem of a bulk update to entities in their platform. I looked at how Jira handles moving multiple tickets from one project to another, and how Facebook ads manager handles changing multiple ad-sets to have the same age to gain some inspiration for how we could possibly solve this issue.
I also took all the fields that make up a campaign to map out which are the fields that the user needs to have aligned. This ended up being a very large table with each field having a status of "update" or "do nothing". I met with members of the customer success team to make sure that the fields I defined as should update make sense to the team.
Analyzed all the support tickets our support engineer handled in the last 3 months to see how often they were supporting this bulk entity update on behalf of the user.
Based on this research I defined the list of fields that had to be handled first and set goals for reducing the amount of support tickets related to aligning entities.
Understanding Limitations
Some of the settings of a Facebook campaign, ad-set or ad cannot be modified after creation, so we had to be mindful of this limitation and come up with a solution. I worked with members of the R&D team to identify what the limitations within Facebook and the system are.
As this process could affect thousands of ads, ad-sets and campaigns live in Facebook and could take a few minutes to run. We had to keep this in mind when defining what the user experiences after they click apply changes.
There is always the possibility that something will fail to update. This had to be taken into account should the process fail to update some entities.
User Flows
I worked out what are the common flows that the user would go through to re-align their campaign.
I sketched these flows to help figure out how this interaction should occur and where there could possibly be holes in the feature.
This helped to guide the UI sketches in the next step.
UI Sketches
I explored two different UI concepts. One where the bulk change would happen on a stand alone screen and one where it would happen in a popup modal.
The stand alone approach raised the question of user control. Should the user be able to apply these changes to some of the items in a campaign.
Since misalignment costs the company a lot of money we had to remove this feature.
Then there was the question of what happens if the user clicks cancel. A stand alone screen didn't make sense from a user standpoint.
The popup was a more simple UI and a flow that the user could easily understand and follow. So we decided to go with this design option.
Design
In the wireframe and user flow steps we found that the best way for the flow to work would be in the form of a popup modal.
This was because the flow would become confusing and inconsistent if the user decided that they wanted to go "back" and not make the changes.
We also decided to not allow the user to select some of the items in a campaign to align, because this went against the business needs and the users didn't find value in having this feature.
We wanted to make sure that we were keeping the user informed of what was going on, especially because this was a process that could take a few minutes, we decided to show them a message letting them know that the process was running in the background and they could continue working.
Copywriting
A feature like this one that impacts company revenue required some deep thinking about the right warning messages to write.
I worked together with a copywriter on staff to make sure we got the messaging just right.
Each of the fields had a custom warning message written, depicting for the user what would happen when they clicked the apply button.
Outcome, Results and Learnings
This feature was partially implemented by two developers due to the amount of settings contained within a campaign. Only the most severe settings were implemented (those that cost the company the most in refunds).
It resulted in a decrease in customer discounts and a decrease in the amount of related support tickets.
I learned that in product design and implementation there is a lot of compromise. There were many feature requests brought up by various stakeholders in this project, but we had to maintain focus on finding the MVP that would drive the most value for everyone involved.