DESIGN LED
SYSTEMS THINKING
Twitter: Unified Ad Creation
Team
Product Designer — Myself
Senior Product Designer (2021)
Content Designer
Design Researcher
Product Manager
Full-stack Engineering Team
Timeline
January 2021 - November 2022
About
A design-led effort to build a unified ad creation flow that allows advertisers to easily create ads of all types and unlocks scale and faster product development.
Default state of the redesigned creation form
Twitter offers 10+ unique ad formats for advertisers to showcase their content. This number has been rapidly increasing, with more than 5 new ad formats designed in the past year alone, along with format innovation and variety.
However, our current ad creation experience is deeply fragmented, leading advertisers to build ads in 3 different places depending on the format: some formats are available for self-serve across 2 different creation tools, while others require direct assistance from a corporate account manager.
As a result, introducing new formats is becoming progressively difficult and forcing advertisers to adapt to an increasingly complicated creation experience.
3 ad formats — 3 different creation experiences
Website Tweet —Tweet Composer
Conversation Card — Legacy composer
Trend Takeover — Corporate account manager
Although the Tweet Composer has been Twitter's primary creation tool since its GA in October 2020, it is not set up to create ads beyond a limited set of Tweet formats. We continued to maintain our legacy composer to keep supporting formats that are not migrated, and placed the burden on our advertisers to learn and remember multiple workflows.
Looking ahead, our creation experience needs to be able to scale to ad types beyond Tweets in order to support existing and upcoming self-serve formats.
By unifying the ad creation experience into one scalable flow, we could reduce friction and learning curve for our advertisers while accelerating product development.
Vision
Build a unified, scalable ad creation experience that allows advertisers to create all self-serve formats and adopt new formats with ease.
State of the Tweet Composer as of Q2 2021 — notice the entry point into the legacy composer.
In order to standardize the creation of all formats, we needed to break down ads into their most basic components that can then be used as building blocks to create different formats.
My design partner and I iterated on a working proposal of our ad taxonomy and led a workshop with the Ad Formats design team to ensure that the taxonomy allows us to scale while maintaining the desired vision for all formats.
Our first iteration of ad taxonomy.
After these initial explorations in 2021, I continued to build on these ideas as a part of related vision work (See Creatives: New Ads Interface). In 2022, I developed two hypotheses for how we might organize these ad components in different hierarchies to serve specific use cases, and translated them into distinct flows.
We then took these flows to research to understand which flow more closely aligned with our advertisers' needs and expectations. The goal of this research was to get to the "why" rather than to decide between the flows as designed — so if neither fully resonated, we would still walk away with a stronger understanding of their offline workflows and needs.
Iteration 1 (Flow A)
Assumes that advertisers typically know exactly what ad they want to build when they come onto our platform, and allows us to collect their intent and format choice up front.
★ Iteration 2 (Flow B)
Assumes that advertisers don't always know, and is designed to ask
advertisers what they want to do with their ad by progressively revealing complexity.
Overall, Flow B resonated better with our advertisers. The most notable reason was that advertisers most often come onto ad platforms with a specific set of assets at hand than with a specific format in mind.
"I want to come to Twitter and see what I can build with what I have." — Research Participant
Based on these learnings, I continued to iterate and designed out experiences for different advertising objectives and upcoming formats with Flow B serving as the foundation.
Flow B — Website Carousel Ad creation flow
As of Q3 2022, the Ad Creation and Ad Formats cross functional teams reached a consensus to implement the new unified experience in Q1 - Q2 2023 and support the creation of all existing and 4 upcoming formats on the redesigned flow.
