An overall better experience for brands & retailers to build branded product pages on a retailers website.
As a new, but still big player in the Retail Media industry, CitrusAd was looking to increase its product offering and turned to developing a new arm of its SaaS platform. This was an assets/creative focused product area, with a much needed update to Brand Pages being the first cab off the ranks in terms of go-to-market.
This would allow brands/clients of retailers (and retailers themselves) to be able to build our branded pages with up to 100 products listed on those pages, inside a retailers website/ad stack. Being the lead (& only) product designer on this team, there was a lot of work to be done - however collaboration with the rest of the squad (developers, product managers and wider design team) was ultimately the key component in delivering the final outcome.
CitrusAd's current brand page offering was severely outdated, lacking in functionality and requiring a large amount of manual effort to use. Due to these limitations, customers were turning to 3rd party tooling and/or even competitors (who could offer a better brand page solution) to help solve this problem for them.
We wanted to limit the need for external tooling, and decrease that manual effort needed (currently taking up to 10+ weeks to build, approve and launch a brand page), when it came to helping our users create a diverse set of advertising campaigns utilising custom, pre-designed retailer-specific brand pages.
Being a green fields project, we (the squad) had the benefit of starting from the very beginning and building something truly from the ground up. After identifying the problem statement (through an initial round of interviews and previous research) that aligned with the business’ strategic goals - we created the projects single-minded value proposition:
Build and launch a brand page within 2 weeks.
By increasing the number of brand page offerings built and served, we were allowing speed to market for brands whilst increasing the revenue for retailers due to more brand ad spend.
A research plan was created after agreeing on our problem statement to help bring guidance and framework to our approach for this product. We also had some constraints around utilising legacy UI components that were already built, even though they may not have fit the overall UI aesthetic - we tried to argue this whenever those components created a poor user experience - and were successful for the most part in creating more intuitive, updated components.
After some further interviews with current customers, retailers and internal teams - I facilitated and lead collaborative workshop sessions with stakeholders, where we did a thematic analysis of what our users were saying. We grouped the insights into themes (& sub themes), and created thematic insights, recommendations and actions from these.
Now having some guidance around the pain points and gaps/opportunities that we discovered, we proceeded to dive further into our user journeys. Utilising design canvases such as User flows, IxD diagrams (interaction design), Decision mapping and JTBD (jobs to be done)/Mental Models.
With most of the initial research now completed and synthesised, I was able to move onto creating lo-fi wireframe mockups of the proposed journey. This was quickly validated via playback to internal stakeholders, a select few internal cross-team members as well as some preference testing - and again, that feedback was synthesised, gaps/opportunities were found and created, and the flow was iterated on in respect of those findings.
Now having more hi-fi designs and a working prototype, I facilitated and lead usability testing sessions to garner some intuitive and vital feedback, specifically around how our users wanted the approval process of brand pages to be more streamlined and integrated into the product offering. Creating a lean messaging system within the brand pages dashboards, allowed for retailers to submit feedback/approval messages, and for brands to see those messages, apply the changes, and re-submit their brand page.
We hit a bit of a blocker however, late into the project we had multiple people either resign or move squads, and our initial squad of 10 - dropped to 6 - so we were on the clock to make sure this product was ready for market at the end of 2023. But credit to the rest of the squad- collaboration and an achievable end goal allowed us to band together to create the working MVP of this product in time for release.
We delivered an MVP version of the Brand Page builder, that was launched at the start of 2024 with our Pilot retailer Sainsbury’s (UK) being the first adopter (apart of the Nector360 loyalty program group). We received incredible feedback saying the integration was so successful, that they had taken their brand page build and launch time from 16 weeks end to end, to just 10-14 days:
“I was able to seamlessly create a brand page using one of the (pre-designed) Nectar templates and have it live on the Sainsbury site within 2 minutes – with the existing processes/tooling Nectar use, this would have been a 10 week process. The adoption of the Brand Page product will reduce what is currently a 16 week e2e process for Nectar down to approximately 2 weeks (with most of this time now being on briefing, IO/PO processes and approvals) thereby reducing the total time for Nectar to turn around brand pages by 14 weeks. Not only is this a much better user experience for both Nectar and their suppliers/advertisers, but it will also allow Nectar to take on more brand page requests expanding what is a very lucrative placement for them.” - Senior Product Manager, Nectar360
