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At Hulu, I sat on the Enterprise Design team. Our responsibility was to ensure that the same level of quality that went into our streaming products, also went into our internal tools. Our products included data, attribution, ads, content management, dogfooding, community and it was growing. So we created a design system (called Trek, cause you know...we're the Enterprise team 😏) across all of our tools to stand them up faster and keep functionality consistent.
One of my projects, I served as the Lead UX/UI on the Hulu Ad Manager - a self-service tool targeted to small to medium sized businesses so that they can autonomously advertise on Hulu. It allowed them to set up a video ad they provided and target it specifically to the audience that matched their needs. This was an interesting project because it was the only product that the Enterprise Team owned that was consumer facing, and really, the only other product outside of streaming that Hulu was releasing. This case study outlines the condition the Hulu Ad Manager was in when I received it, and how we grew it into what it is now.
Also, please note that this case study doesn't document the full details, those will be disclosed in an interview setting.
Our design system, while intended to improve the UX of all of our internal tools, was also in its infancy.
The input field components didn't quite capture the clarity and flexibility needed to make an intuitive UX. There were also problems with the interaction designs which led to mistake clicks mainly in navigating the campaign builder. Other problems persisted in information hierarchy and over-messaging.
A closed beta was to be launched on March 1st, 2020, leading to a public beta by July 2020. I inhereted the project late November 2019.
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Experiences like user manuals and the marketing website had lesser progress, and needed support to better connect into the overall customer journey.
In addition to the UX woes, there were still designs of the product that were left incomplete. Experiences such as reporting, payment processing, and certain campaign building features were not even designed yet and needed to be completed for the closed beta.
We needed to harness data around which parts of the product needed improvements, then use that data to focus on where to put the design effort.
Because peripheral experiences were so underdeveloped and had little resources, we needed to find ways to efficiently stand them up and integrate them into our journey for launch.
To help our enterprise design system expand to handle a consumer facing product, I set up meetings with the Hulu Web experiences team to better understand their color and UI element choices. The result created a stronger connection between the two teams and led to the evolution of the enterprise design system.
The Ad Manager has five major areas: onboarding, campaign building, reporting, content management, and account management. The surveys clearly indicated that campaign building in the Hulu Ad Manager was a big problem that led to user dissatisfaction. Outside of entering basic information like name and date of a campaign, users felt that the targeting metrics were rather confusing and bloated. They also didn't know how to use the targeting metrics, confirming our assumptions that the UI was not clear (forced design system).
We had a few lab testing sessions already scheduled to test the existing product, but based off the surveys, I thought it would be a good idea to design some initial mocks to improve the targeting metrics on campaign building. The goal was to test them against the existing product to see if we were headed in the right direction.
The users liked the new direction by a significant margin and it gave us the signal to charge ahead with this new UX/UI.
We had two technical writers on staff who were completing a thorough user manual for the Ad Manager. We didn't have any development resources or budget to develop a custom and native user learning experience, so we had to use a third party software to execute the experience for us. In order to "fake" the native integration of this software into the Hulu ecosystem, I delivered a typography and iconography language that could then be used to style the software to look like Hulu. We then iframed the whole software with a custom header to fully integrate it.
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We hired an external agency to carry out the design and development of the Hulu Ad Manager marketing website. I served as a UX/UI consultant on the project making sure it upheld the Hulu web brand look and feel (typography, colors, accessibility) and also make sure it funneled users into the product in the best way possible. I also made an effort to make sure the site highlighted the product's best features.
Because we had outsourced the development of the product to a development team specialized in ad tools, we were limited to their functionality in reporting and targeting. We needed to design solutions within the confines of their capabilities. For example, we wanted location targeting to be much more visual with a map-oriented interface, but were limited to entering zip codes and cities with no radius proximity entry. We also wanted an impression availability meter throughout the campaign building process, but had to scrap the idea.
A significant portion of the targeting options were pulled from super technical metrics that ad professionals use, which was not as user friendly, especially for small to medium sized businesses. We needed to reduce the bloated and overlapping options.
As mentioned above, the Trek Design system couldn't fit the needs of data entry that the targeting section of the product needed. Instead of forcing more UI elements, I needed to create new ones and justify them being added to the design system.
We saw a lot of people within the education sector wanting to advertise on Hulu and the rollout was slow and phased, but we were able to scale up from 0 to 250 customers by sort of drip feeding customers onto the platform. It tested our scale in terms of infrastructure and processes. The Hulu Ad Manager became a strong example of a successful expansion of business and revenue company-wide, and was featured in Disney's Investor Day Presentation.
Users reported that the product was easy to use and felt that they had "their flow" on it. We even saw people coming back and A/B testing their commercials and seeing the reporting performances differed.
Users wanted to to be able to track when and ad was seen and which device it was seen on. They wanted both top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel reporting metrics, which gave way to getting pixel tracking integration on the roadmap for the product.
