YouTube’s In-App Messaging Platform Redesign
Overview
Redesigned and restructured the user flow of the global campaign creation platform used by YouTube marketing teams across 194 countries. This initiative aimed to streamline manual processes, enhance work efficiency, reduce campaign production costs, and optimize the impact of the company's growth while supporting various product teams at YouTube.Annual OKR (Objectives and key results)
Investment in a platform to enhance work efficiency
Every year, the marketing teams create over 2,000 YouTube campaigns with 10,000 creative variations in the campaign creation platform called Nitrate Console, operating in 195 countries.
Design process
In the process of redesigning the Console platform, I took on the responsibility of contributing to the early stages of setting product goals, roadmap, and success metrics. I worked closely with product managers and diverse cross-functional stakeholders, seeking their input to refine the design, ensuring it effectively solved their user needs.
Identifying issues with cross-functional stakeholders and planning a roadmap
I collaborated with a project manager to set project goals and define the roadmap and success metrics. In the absence of a UX researcher, I partnered with the project manager to conduct 26 user interviews, involving YouTube PMM, PM, and Eng, to understand the problem space.
The average marketing campaigns takes about 7 weeks
Roles: UX lead
• Roadmap & Strategy planning with cross-functional partner alignment.• Workshop planning and facilitation. • UXR prototyping• End-to-end design • Design system and visual design Year: 2021-2022
Context
As the demand for the Nitrate team's in-app messaging promotions increased to support the growth of new products or features, the campaign creation tool called Nitrate Console, used by the global YouTube marketing teams, needs to be updated.
The goal for Nitrate Console V2 is to accelerate subscription business and all YT products growth in the next 3-5 years via powerful growth features and efficiency improvement.
This update aims to speed up the campaign-building process and reduce human errors through automation support, ultimately driving business impact efficiently.
Main problems
Complex Console interface
With more teams onboard to Nitrate Console, the user flow becomes complex and time-consuming for existing growth marketing team’s users, and it’s also hard for new partner teams to understand. It takes 100+ slides to train a person on how the current Console works.
Two main goals
1. Speed up the overall campaign building process
(OKR goal: Decrease campaign building times by 50% from 1-3 days to less than 1 day.)
Inefficiency Console UX slows down the marketing team's work to drive YouTube paid-product signups
• It takes 30 hours to make 1 small change across evergreen campaigns.
• Evergreen campaigns need to be updated frequently to avoid YT users’ visual fatigue.
2. Make the Console more intuitive to use
Allow the marketing team easily configure campaigns without human errors.
Breakdowns of campaign components
Campaign creation process in the Console
Multi-platform integration
To reduce user annoyance while improving campaign engagement, YT marketing teams need more robust features for the next level of growth. These features are not compatible with the current console’s workflow or architecture.
(For example: Journey Builder, Experiment setup in Console)
Brainstorming workshop sessions with stakeholders
Console V2 design
Updated design after UXR testing results
Marketing team’s feedback: “We typically create 1-5 campaigns just for one campaign, due to a lot of redundant targeting work”
Updated design after UXR testing results
Support auto-sync between the Console and the internal review platform,
enabling campaign builders to minimize manual updates in two different places where edits are necessary.
A side-by-side comparison view of the data chart is available for the marketing team to easily review pending changes.
