• Background
• My Role
• My Contributions
  • Understanding where users struggled
  • Turning user insight into product priorities
  • Building a user-focused product culture
• Outcome

Background

On The Trade Desk platform, creative workflows cover the process of getting an advertisement onto the platform and ready to serve. When The Trade Desk wins an ad impression through a bid, an uploaded creative can be shown as long as it has been set up correctly and meets the requirements of the publisher selling the ad space.

For users, this involves more than simply uploading a creative. They need to upload and verify it, assign it to the appropriate campaign and ad group strategy, and monitor it once the campaign goes live. If a creative stops serving or encounters an issue, users then need to identify what went wrong and troubleshoot it.

My Role

As Senior Manager, UX Design for the Creative workstream, I was responsible for its overall UX health. This meant advocating for users’ needs across the associated workflows — not only ensuring individual features were designed and developed to a high standard, but also influencing product priorities so we invested in the problems and features that would have a positive impact on the user experience.

My Contributions

Understanding where users struggled

To better understand how users experienced creative workflows, I got my team to gather insights from multiple sources, including direct user research, product telemetry to understand user behaviour, and relevant JIRA tickets.

We then synthesised these signals across the entire workflow and mapped them into a heat map showing where user pain points were concentrated. This gave us a more holistic view of the experience and highlighted two areas with the strongest signals for improvement: uploading creatives and troubleshooting issues when creatives failed to work as expected.

Turning user insight into product priorities

I leveraged our bi-annual workstream offsites to secure airtime for UX to walk the entire product team through the user insights we had uncovered. The clarity of the heatmap helped build alignment around where the biggest user pain points were, and gave us a shared basis for discussing what to prioritise.

We then used these insights to guide brainstorming around potential product opportunities, two of which gained traction:

• Preventing errors at upload, rather than troubleshooting them later. Our analysis showed that many downstream creative errors could be traced back to a complex and unintuitive upload experience. This helped reframe part of the troubleshooting problem as an upstream usability problem: by making creative and bulk uploads easier and less error-prone, we could prevent some issues from occurring in the first place. This convinced Product to prioritise improvements to the upload experience.

• Making it easier to replace a faulty creative. When mapping how users responded to errors, we identified another gap: if an issue was discovered after a creative had already been assigned across multiple campaigns and ad groups, there was no easy way to replace it. This was corroborated by user feedback requesting bulk unassignment capabilities. I proposed a replace creative functionality that could address the underlying need, which backend engineering subsequently prioritised for technical investigation.

Building a user-focused product culture

Beyond these specific initiatives, I worked with Product and Engineering leads to build a culture within the team where user feedback was continuously surfaced, discussed and acted upon. This meant that improving the user experience wasn’t limited to individual UX projects, but became part of how the team collectively made product decisions.

Outcome

A year after commencing UX support for the Creative workstream, our Product Owner reported a 40% reduction in the time users spent completing creative workflows, based on product telemetry. This was further supported by a platform-wide study conducted by a separate Engineering team, which found that Creative was the only product domain to show a meaningful downward trend in task completion time during this period.

Product and Engineering leadership also adopted a relatively hands-off approach with the Creative team, as they felt we had established a clear product direction grounded in data.