Users stick to Excel and spreadsheets after using this for over 20 years.

Many users are satisfied with their current inefficient workflows and haven't had time to consider improvements because they are constantly busy with weekly ad and display cycles.
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Stakeholder Interview
‍Designing complex systems requires understanding the people who will use them. Stakeholder interviews are a powerful tool for this. By talking to key decision-makers, users, and stakeholders, we gained crucial insights into their goals, current experiences, processes, and challenges. The aim is to identify pain points and find ways to nudge them towards making positive changes.

Building Trust
‍Besides understanding, we also need support from these people. We built long-term relationships by involving them early, from the immersion phase through vision and roadmap planning, and at every key decision point. During the delivery process, we kept them informed with bi-weekly share-out sessions. Transparency is key to building trust.
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The outcomes from this stage informed us an overview of the client's digital landscape, culture, beliefs, experience and some high-level pain points caused by their organizational structure.

A lot of communication and collaboration within the same department as well as between different departments and vendors.

A lot of back-and-forth contact during the ad planning process, including last minute changes.
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Journey Map (Workflow)
‍Visualization tools such as journey map and workflow helped us a lot at this stage since there were a lot of interactions and collaboration between each departments in the ad and display planning process. This loads of interactions can be commonly found for internal product development like this one. By focusing on these interactions and identifying breakpoints, we gained a clearer understanding of the system.
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Instead of discussing their goals, users tend to deep dive into their tasks and processes.

Users describe workflow as bits and pieces that make it difficult to connect and see the larger picture.

Some experienced users tend to work intuitively.
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Journey Map (Goals)
In complex workflows with tight collaboration between teams, it's easy to lose focus. To stay on track, we identified each team's goals by marking their final task as the goal. Grouping each workflow stage into a larger flow helped pinpoint the main goal across multiple teams.
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5 Whys
‍Users often start by explaining what they do rather than why they do it. The 5 Whys technique helped us dig deeper to uncover their true needs and what they were trying to accomplish.
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Large data sets with duplicated data in different places and frustration with the amount of data from ad versioning.

Users use jargons to communicate.
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Journey Map (Input and Output)
The key when working on a flow that involves high volume of data, is to focus on the sharing and transferring of information among users. By identifying this critical information and tracking its flow and transformation through input and output, you can gain a clear understanding of the system.

Writing a Case Study or Asking for Design Critique
Surprisingly, the process of writing this as a case study and preparing for a shareout helped me a lot to reflect my learnings and simplify my discoveries. Besides, I found myself using visual aids and simple terms to explain the jargons during critiques.
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Interconnection of multiple and legacy back-end systems and databases that support an application.

Disintegration between the vendor's app and the internal app results in breakpoints and jumping from one app to the next.
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Journey map (Tools and Systems)
During the ad and display planning process, different teams use various tools. Even within the same team, some experienced users create their own tools as workarounds. Therefore, it's crucial to list all the tools and systems involved to complete my journey map.

Pairing with developers
‍Luckily with my coding background, I find it easy to collaborate with developers. By teaming up with our engineers and using their expertise, we can connect the dots between different legacy systems, identify slow, manual processes, and pinpoint areas in the platform that impact the user experience.
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