How UX Helped Digital Marketers Scale
Setting the Scene
Imagine you're a Digital Marketer responsible for approving ad campaigns. But instead of an intuitive dashboard, you're drowning in spreadsheets and disconnected data.
Every day, teams passed around approval sheets—often losing track, decoding complex data, and struggling to complete even the simplest of approval tasks.
The current process was slow and really frustrating!
About Traffic by Intent
I had the opportunity to work with Traffic By Intent, an AI-driven ad performance marketing company on this challenge that directly impacted their workflow.
Traffic By Intent provides AI-driven insights to help marketers scale their ad performance. But as the complexity of campaigns grew, their existing platform made approvals incredibly time-consuming and frustrating.
The Business Challenge
The challenge—when data isn’t structured effectively, it turns into data chaos!
Our goal was to create an experience that prioritized usability, a polished interface, and a professional brand-guided aesthetic.
📌 Pain Points:
✔ Marketers were drowning in fragmented data → Spending 30% more time manually approving campaigns instead of optimizing them.
✔ Approval time per ad: 2-3 minutes per ad (spent deciphering spreadsheet changes, unclear version history).
✔ CSAT Score: 1 out of 5 (Users rated the current process frustrating and inefficient).
UX Challenges
❌ No Clear Collaboration Flow - Users couldn’t see who made changes, left feedback, or touched the campaign—creating silos and duplicate work.
❌ No Version Control - Without a way to track updates or see past iterations, approvals felt uncertain and prone to errors.
❌ Missing Status Visibility - Marketers didn’t know which ads were approved, pending, or stuck—making campaign progress hard to track.
❌ Too Many Clicks to Insight - It took several steps to understand performance or make an informed decision. Users wanted insight in context, not hidden behind layers.
❌ Disconnected Tools - Approval conversations happened in spreadsheets, emails, and screenshots—none of which lived where the work was being done.
❌ Clunky Workflows, No Prioritization - Without indicators for what needed attention, users had to manually sort and scan—slowing them down and increasing the chance of missed approvals.
The Approach
To redesign Traffic By Intent's approval system, we needed to understand user pain points, business goals, and how digital marketers actually worked. Our research uncovered the limitations of spreadsheets as an approval tool and the opportunities for a scalable, more efficient solution.
Business Goals
📌 Client Meeting – Understanding the Challenge
In our initial meeting, TXI (Traffic By Intent) outlined their focus:
✅ AI-Driven Search Engine Marketing (SEM) → Helping businesses optimize paid search performance.
✅ The Approval Process → Marketers approved ad campaigns using a shared spreadsheet.
✅ The Goal → Improve user confidence and streamline approvals with a polished UX.
📌 Key Takeaways From the Meeting:
✔ The spreadsheet approval process wasn’t meeting customer needs.
✔ TXI’s clients wanted a polished, centralized platform.
✔ Streamlining the approval process would boost user confidence & efficiency.
✔ Initial discussions focused on collaborative feedback, flexible free-form data entry, and a professional login.
Evaluative Research – Uncovering Pain Points
The biggest surprise? The spreadsheet was the product.
Since this was the existing solution, we needed to conduct evaluative research to understand what worked—and what didn’t.
📌 Heuristic Evaluation of the Spreadsheet (Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics)
We assessed the approval process for efficiency, learnability, and user satisfaction.
Competitive Analysis
What Industry Standards Showed Us
We analyzed competing solutions to see how TXI’s approval system compared.
✅ Centralized systems with dashboards → Users could track approvals at a glance.
✅ Filters & sorting options → Allowed users to surface relevant data instantly.
✅ Version history & access controls → Users could see past approvals and who made changes.
✅ Professional login & permissions → Ensured the right people had access at the right time.
These insights showed how industry leaders handled approvals, helping shape our UX strategy.
The User Journey
When Approvals Become a Bottleneck
We interviewed digital marketers to understand their frustrations & needs.
📌 Pain Points:
❌ Lack of Control → The spreadsheet created data chaos.
❌ Frustrating Communication → Users had difficulty tracking updates.
❌ Poor Categorization → Users struggled to organize & find past approvals.
❌ Versioning Issues → They wanted to see past versions & understand ad updates.
📌 What Users Valued:
✔ A Sense of Control → Users wanted to feel ownership over the approval process.
✔ Team Collaboration → One person typically approved ads, then shared updates with their team.
✔ Trust & Partnership → Digital marketers valued their relationship with TXI and needed a platform that reinforced that trust.
What Wasn't Working
The research uncovered a consistent pain point: digital marketers lacked a streamlined, centralized way to review and approve campaigns. The result? Delays, confusion, and missed opportunities.
This visual comparison highlights how the existing experience caused friction and how our intended solution aimed to simplify and align the approval journey.
Who We're Designing For
Digital marketers aren’t just strategists—they’re the approval gatekeepers, data wranglers, and campaign quarterbacks all at once. Their days are filled with high-stakes decisions, yet they’re often forced to navigate a maze of spreadsheets, scattered email threads, and disconnected dashboards.
They’re constantly trying to figure out what’s changed, what needs their input, and what’s ready to move. What they need most is clarity, speed, and control—a way to cut through the noise and keep campaigns moving forward without dropping the ball.
Their aim is to stay in control of approvals without micromanaging
✔ Quickly understand campaign status and changes
✔ Collaborate easily without chasing down updates
✔ Reduce delays that slow down marketing execution
Research to Reality
Defining the Digital Marketer’s Needs
Now that we understand the Digital Marketer's journey, what changes needed to happen?
Key priorities (bullet points, each linked to a design decision):
📌 Clear Visibility of System Status – Marketers needed to instantly see ad approval progress without searching.
📌 Seamless Collaboration – Comments, versioning, and better team communication were critical.
📌 Efficient Task Flow – We needed to minimize the steps in the approval process.
From Problems to Solutions
With a clear understanding of our users’ challenges, it was time to translate insights into actionable solutions. Instead of jumping straight into design, we structured our approach through research-backed frameworks—framing problems effectively, exploring solutions rapidly, and prioritizing impact.
Framing the Problem for Ideation
To move from problem identification to solutions, I guided the team through a 'How Might We' (HMW) exercise. This shifted the focus from what wasn’t working to actionable opportunities:
✔ How might we make approvals effortless?
✔ How might we surface key insights faster?
✔ How might we make the process more collaborative?
This exercise ensured that we weren’t just reacting to frustrations but actively uncovering new opportunities for improvement.
Envisioning a Frictionless Flow
Before the redesign, marketers were stuck in a fog of tools, spreadsheets, and disjointed steps. Scattered data, scattered minds. This visual captures how strategic UX decisions cleared that fog—reducing friction, surfacing context, and helping marketers move from confusion to confident action.
Diverging & Converging
Design Thinking
With these guiding questions, a Design Studio workshop helped generate and refine ideas. This fast-paced exercise helped explore multiple concepts and align on high-value solutions.
To ensure we focused on impactful solutions, I introduced a Priority Matrix (Impact vs. Effort):
📌 Quick Wins – Immediate, high-impact updates.
📌 Big Projects – Large-scale improvements requiring more investment.
This structured process ensured that every decision was driven by user and business needs, feasibility, and long-term scalability.
Turning Research into Action
Key UX Priorities
Our iterative design approach wasn’t just about improving visuals—it was about creating a platform that truly worked for marketers. By aligning our solutions with user behaviors and pain points, we prioritized three core areas of improvement:
Collaboration & Transparency
✅ Version History & Comments – Track changes, leave notes, and tag team members.
✅ Visual Notification Reminders – Action items surfaced immediately.
✅ Brand Messaging Guidelines – Ensuring users follow clear brand communication rules.
Building Trust & Efficiency
✅ TXI Robot – A guided experience providing system status updates.
✅ FAQs & Help Center – Ensuring users feel confident with accessible resources.
✅ Metrics & Insights – Helping marketers understand their progress and impact.
Delivering Impact
The redesigned platform transformed digital marketing approvals from a spreadsheet into an intuitive, collaborative, and efficient workflow. With streamlined approvals, improved visibility, and user-driven enhancements. Digital Marketers could now focus on executing campaigns instead of wrestling with data overload.
Measurable Improvements
Before the redesign, users were drowning in data and stuck in spreadsheets. Approvals lagged, insight was buried, and campaign flow felt clunky. After we reworked the experience with cleaner layouts, contextual UI, and simpler workflows, everything clicked—literally.
Now, marketers can find what they need faster, approve with confidence, and actually feel in control. These numbers show just how far the experience evolved.
UX Enhancements That Made a Difference
📌 Key UX Enhancements & Features
✔ Collaborative Approvals & Version History – Improved transparency with clear tracking of ad changes, comments, and approvals.
✔ Faster Decision-Making with a Clear CTA – A dedicated “Approve Campaign” button reduced confusion and increased efficiency.
✔ Visual Indicators & Notifications – Users received real-time updates on approval status, deadlines, and pending actions.
✔ Brand Messaging Guidelines for Compliance – Easily accessible brand guidelines ensured ad content met regulatory and brand requirements.
✔ Trust & Usability: The TXI Robot Assistant – An AI-powered assistant (mascot) was introduced to provide onboarding tips and guidance throughout the process.
User Testing & Insights
We conducted usability testing to validate the design decisions and ensure they met user needs.
📌 Key Feedback & Learnings
🧭 Additional Context – Users needed clearer instructions for tasks.
🗂️ Sorting & Filtering – Redundant columns needed better organization.
⏩ Reduced Scrolling – Quick access to relevant data was a priority.
📘 Brand Guidelines at a Glance – Users wanted easy access to compliance guidelines.
👥 Improved Collaboration – Users needed better visibility on who made changes.
🧹 Fewer Unnecessary Pages – A streamlined experience was preferred.
📦 Batch Approvals – Marketers wanted the ability to approve multiple ads at once.
🧭 Progress Indicators – Users wanted a clear understanding of where they were in the process.
Reflections & Takeaways
📌 Project Scope Creep – Time constraints in a 3-week sprint meant deprioritizing onboarding, which we recommended as a future project.
📌 Client Communication Wins – To ensure alignment:
✔ Created shared documents for both teams.
✔ Copied stakeholders on all relevant communications.
✔ Finalized and sent customer communication emails for approval.
📌 Future Enhancements – Given additional time, a recommendation was made to explore AI-powered recommendations to further enhance insights.
📌 Team Collaboration – I felt that each team member played to their strengths, leading to a seamless execution.
