Design Challenge: Our team wants to make an ad consulting platform with Twitter data to help marketing teams maximize ROI on their ad campaigns.

Good design is built upon a foundation of research that we can use to define the user problem and continuously assess if our solution is solving said problem. Since this design challenge does not specify the research context and user problem, I will be working backwards to understand how my hypothetical product team came to the conclusion of providing a Twitter-specific ad consulting platform. Only after understanding the user and the problem space can we propose designs for the solution.

Understanding the User

User Problem

First we needed to understand why marketing teams would feel like maximizing ROI for ad campaigns. One possible problem is that our users are getting pressure to justify or reduce financial resources requested to run ad campaigns in this current economy.

User Flow and User Needs

After understanding what the problem our users are dealing with, we can start to understand what the user workflow is and how they are currently dealing with the problem. In understanding the user flow, we can identify what the user needs are in the different parts of the flow.

Technology

Next, we can understand how we think our technology can help solve the user’s needs in various parts of their workflow.

Design

Information Architecture

Now that we have a high-level view of the user flow that we want to support and how our technology factors into it, we can divide the desired functionality broadly into categories that the users might expect to find together. I’ve divided it into “defining” actions and “measuring” actions.

Sketches

Next, it’s time to do some sketches of possible layouts with what we understand from the user flow.

Blue Wireframes

I then did a few higher fidelity blue wireframes to have a more polished proof of concept for the layout, presentation, and organization. I like to work at this fidelity when gathering feedback from engineers, product managers, and other designers. I would then choose to produce higher fidelity mockups depending on the maturity of the design system and the novelty of introduced features.