Evolving an Agency with Scalable Tech

SteelHouse was in need of a tech and design overhaul. The UI was almost unusable for clients. They had a large client service team building ads, launching campaigns, and optimizing them, so clients never had to touch anything. To scale the business, the product needed to be redesigned to actually be usable for the average marketer. From my time at SteelHouse I designed new products such as a WYSIWIG ad builder, a step-by-step multi-channel campaign builder, intuitive audience targeting tools, understandable dashboards and a few other things along the way.

Sumary

As a designer who was at one point was working with 7 different PMs and 3 major products simultaneously, speed and efficiency were critical on the design team. These factors lead me to upgrade the tools, process, and skills on the team to support an ambitious roadmap. I moved the team off of Photoshop, Axure, and other out-of-date software and introduced Sketch, Invision, Webflow, and Framer. I hired specialists in visual designs, UX design, and research to round out the team. We created a styleguide which was non-existent, high-fidelity prototypes, and user testing / data analysis deliverables.

My first project entailed building a WYSIWIG ad creation tool that would be easy enough for the average marketer to use. This tool radically changed the company internally and externally. Our internal teams custom designed and coded complex ads that included animations, multiple scenes, and dynamic products. This eliminated the need for coding for us and our customers, saving lots of time and money. It also allowed us to attract customers with smaller budgets and limited deadlines. We further accelerated the speed in which users could build ads by creating a workflow, where users would only design 3 ads of varied proportions and have the tool programmatically create 20 more ads of various sizes. That's a 767% increase in productivity.

We created a step-by-step wizard to allow users to create complex, multi-channel advertising campaigns in one easy flow. Users would first create their ads, create Facebook ads, segment an audience, set a tracking pixel, setup billing, review, and then launch. This product went through many iterations and evolutions to make it more and more simplified for users.

We also rebuilt dashboards and reporting tools within the new business model that SteelHouse created. We wanted to make it super easy and surface the data the majority of marketers cared about while still providing high level custom reporting tools that allowed users to view and construct reports the way they wanted.