Drive awareness and purchase intent for advertisers by integrating relevant promoted content into core buyer experiences on Reverb.
Brands and shops want to promote their offerings to the most relevant individuals. Reverb is the best destination for their target audience, and so they want to promote new product launches (brands) and unique inventory (shops) directly to Reverb users at a competitive ROI.
Increase take rate in aggregate across Reverb, driving more revenue from the sell-side of the marketplace.
Deliver a new technical platform and two live campaigns within 60 days, in order to prove the potential of the product.
Using insights from Baymard Institute (a UX Research firm for E-commerce), I created a document identifying the risks to consider for placing advertisements in the marketplace.
This document informed our decisions and helped us be intentional if we decided to place ads in riskier areas of the experience in order to learn how they performed in our product context.
As inspiration (and what not to do), I gathered examples of advertising from around the internet, including our competitors and comparable e-commerce experiences.
Before beginning to design the experience, I outlined the principles of the experience to guide decisions.
I facilitated a workshop to define our MVP scope, within a 90 minute meeting, so that team members could hit the ground running toward our goal.
Leading up to the workshop, the team had felt unclear about the direction, so there were cycles being wasted exploring and building things that may or may not have been in scope for the MVP.
After the workshop, everyone was able to focus on tasks needed to deliver the MVP in our time frame.
Marketplace search results were the highest trafficked destination for internal traffic, so we wanted to start there.
I created a wireframe exploring potential placements for the MVP.
I explored the ad unit layouts and visual style, using assets from some of the brands who were interested in using premium ads.
After the initial mockups, I started directing a visual designer in marketing to further explore and produce the ads for the MVP campaigns.
I always partner closely with engineering, bringing at least a lead engineer into the design process before the solution is defined and design begins.
Once design iterations begin, I always reach out to engineers for feedback on the designs.
Sometimes back and forth is needed to land on a feasible solution, such as in this case, where the responsive breakpoints were something we played with together for a bit before landing on a solution that flexed consistently across all devices and content.
I also like to create prototypes to help engineers understand not just the layout but also what the interactions look and feel like.
We were putting a lot more focus on the mobile web experience, so in this case, I created a prototype specifically for mobile.
MVP delivered in less than 60 days with positive signal.
Launched with three campaigns, including a last minute additional Boss campaign that was turned around in 72 hours.
The MVP had significant positive revenue and user engagement, which opened to door to begin scaling campaigns to more products and brands.
With positive signal, we began iterating on the experience. I directed the design and facilitation of a workshop to help focus our next iterations.
We focused on the follow How Might We statements:
The workshop lead to an expansion of pages, ad types and target customers for premium advertising. The product is continuing to evolve to this day.
