Problem

When I joined Chartboost, the company had just begun evaluating their products holistically. At the time, we had multiple platforms, each with an incoherent look and feel, and disorienting, fragmented transitions between them. This created a disjointed user experience. One of the most complex offerings, Mediation, had been developed without design involvement and was primarily driven by the engineering team. As a result, the product was feature-rich but suffered from poor usability, with key issues such as low discoverability.

Strategy and Process

This multi-quarter project required a strategic approach, centered on our core user base—power users who spent several hours per week on the platform. I conducted in-depth contextual interviews with five power users to uncover their patterns, workarounds, and interactions with competitor platforms, mapping these insights to our existing personas (shown in the image below). An extensive usage data analysis revealed a "say-do gap": while power users requested more complex features, they rarely utilized existing ones to their full potential. These insights helped us focus on maximizing value by refining core workflows, while avoiding feature creep.

Building on our initial research, we refined our personas and optimized the platform to meet the distinct needs of both Revenue Managers and Data Analysts.

By leading a weekly working group, I fostered collaboration to ensure alignment through sketching, wireframing, flow mapping, and iterative refinement of the final solution. This process enabled the step-by-step creation of a vision shared by all stakeholders.

Solution

The outcome was a fully reimagined platform, optimized for efficiently displaying large datasets and complex information. We significantly enhanced the user experience by eliminating the need for complex workarounds, introducing features like batch operations that enabled users to perform their most frequent actions more efficiently. This made previously tedious tasks less burdensome, resulting in a more productive workflow.

For Revenue Managers, we focused on providing a high-level overview of performance metrics, giving them more visibility and control. We maintained a dedicated section for Data Analysts, allowing them to access detailed, in-depth reports to support their more complex data analysis needs. This dual approach ensured that both user groups could efficiently achieve their goals within the platform.

Below are additional screens from the delivered product, highlighting reusable keywords and rules, quick setup for waterfall line items, and features like batch actions and filtering.

While working on the core features, I also supported other designers and encouraged them to explore solutions beyond the design system, enhancing their visual problem-solving skills. Shown below is the report creation UI before & after a few design critique sessions.

To wrap up the first phase of the project, I organized and conducted a series of in-person and remote user testing that gave overwhelmingly positive results, with 85% of participants successfully completing their tasks, despite being unfamiliar with the platform. This demonstrated the effectiveness of the design enhancements in improving usability and productivity.

This project is currently undergoing development and will be released by the end of 2024.