My role in Merchant Self-serve Ads product
As part of a team of four product designers, I contributed to the design of onboarding and ad creation flows. Additionally, I participated in user interview and testing sessions, which helped to provide a better understanding of user insights.
Customer profile
Longtail merchants who is not served by our GrabFood Account Managers. Consequently, they can't reach consumers, gain visibility, and drive sales in the GrabFood platform with low to moderate budget
Research objectives
I participated in an interview session with the User Research team, during which we established several objectives, as outlined below:
- Understand how long tail merchants view advertising as a business activity (ads vs. promo definition, perception, expectation, platform awareness and intention to use)
- Understand long tail merchants journey when they promote their business (trigger, placement experience, strengths and weaknesses for each platform, expected result from ads placement)
- Identify the understandability of MSS GrabAds brochure and willingness to use
Dive into the merchant problems
The key issues identified in our findings are summarized below:
- No visibility:A few merchants we talked to want to increase the visibility of the promotional campaigns they’re running. Simply put, “Promote the promos”
- No ability to increase their sales:Long tail merchants are usually busy with their store. They are not likely to have time to plan and execute marketing objectives. They expect “GrabFood to help in expanding my business”
- Low budget for other paid advertisements:Many long tail merchants are unlikely to afford influencers or expensive paid advertisements
- Not tech savvy:It’s difficult for long tail merchants to understand other online marketing platforms. This is a benefit for GrabFood since they are already familiar with our platform and trust our business like a partner.
Solution
“A Self-serve ad creation” tools allow merchants to boost their visibility in the Merchant app when they need to increase their sales in every situation (new product launch, promotions, rainy day, low sales day, and etc.).
User flows
The first step is introducing Merchant to what GrabFood ads are and how ads can help their business.
Choose ad type
Merchant is able to choose between Food Banner ads and Food Search ads.
Creates ad to promote their existing promotion(s)
Merchant creates ads with customized banners or selective keywords.
My role in Ad Manager Tool
In this product squad, my position is Lead Product Designer. In collaboration with the front-end and back-end engineering teams, I played an independent role to create and deliver effective advertising tools. My efforts were directed towards assisting the Ads department in its growth objectives.
The Ad Manager for Marketers and Sales Pros
I took the lead in designing an internal GrabAds product, incorporating user data and insights to facilitate the creation of advertisements. Upon joining the team, I conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the existing design and product and identified several significant areas for improvement, including:
- A lack of integration with internal Grab products due to the use of an external platform
- Limitations in features and a poorly structured information design.
- Additionally, there was no data tracking for ads published on the Grab consumer app.
Gain an understanding of the product and the ultimate goals of expert users through observing their daily tasks."
The results of our observation indicated that despite the extensive number of functions available on the external tool, users only utilize a limited number, such as setting up ads and uploading banners. However, a significant amount of time is spent by these users searching for the desired functionality.
Final Design
Our Ads product team has successfully replaced the previously utilised external tool by developing an internal system explicitly designed for the Sales team to manage ads daily. As a result, this new product has proven highly cost-effective, leading to substantial savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for the company.
Other projects
Elfie
Tolka
Arable
Jitera