In 2020, the Ads team set out to evaluate the current position of our ad products in the industry and establish a clear vision for the future of Twitter ads.
As the lead designer on Ad Creation, I partnered with my product manager to discover that our ad creation experience lacked opinion and scalability in comparison to our competitors, causing advertisers to work too hard to use our tools.
We then identified an opportunity to give our advertisers greater control and ROI: by allowing them to create one ad unit that can be adapted to multiple placements (where the ad is shown), thereby increasing reach with little to no extra work on their part.
With this vision in mind, I joined forces with two other designers on the Ads design team working on campaign creation and reporting to co-create an end-to-end proof of concept. By leveraging clear visuals, we could help stakeholders better align on an ideal future while showing the potential impact of committing to the technical investments needed.
Our effort was successful, and as a result, NAI evolved into a larger engineering project to rebuild our existing architecture in order to set us up for scale in preparation of the changes we envisioned.
Ad creation was planned as the third NAI milestone, scheduled for 2022. In the meantime, I continued to build on the ideas from this work into a long-term design strategy, learn from research, and work on incremental changes to move us closer to the vision.
In 2021, Twitter was on its way to having the most profitable year in company history, with 92% of the company revenue generated by ads. This momentum gave our Ads design team a unique opportunity to showcase a high-quality, cohesive vision of the ideal Twitter Ads experience with the goal of influencing product roadmap.
I partnered with another designer for my workstream to further develop and demonstrate a more scalable future of ad creation and how it might accommodate more complex upcoming ad formats.
Creatives NAI was ranked consistently high for Twitter Ads' 2022 prioritization lists and officially kicked off in Q1 2022.
This effort had two phases: 1. a technical rebuild to unlock cleaner product development, and 2. lifecycle improvements to serve as a foundation for ambitious upcoming projects.
To accomplish this work, we needed to establish and align on our principles and rules, plan and sequence incremental milestones, and design all aspects of the overall experience.
For Phase 1, I created a workflow diagram that outlines an example of an advertiser's journey through all parts of the ad creation process. The main purpose of this was to help engineers redesign the infrastructure, but also to provide a reference and source of truth for our engineers.
After multiple discussions with our engineering leads, we successfully reached alignment and established a plan of action, and they began eng investigation in Q2 2022.
As of Q4 2022, we were in Phase 2 and engineering was underway for lifecycle improvement items.
Between 2020-2022, we shipped multiple incremental but key changes that brought us closer to the vision:
• Ad Naming, a highly requested feature that allows advertisers to name their ads, went to GA in Q4 2021.
• We deprecated the legacy composer in Q1 2022 after 1 1/2 years of maintaining the tool in a legacy state.
• In Q1 2022, we launched Single Ad Editing for advertisers to make changes to their ads post creation.
• In-Campaign Ads Creation went to GA in Q3 2022, now allowing advertisers to create ads within the advertising campaign creation context.