The Concert SSP, launched at the end 2022, is Vox Media’s homegrown supply-side platform that enables the programmatic buying of Athena inventory (our proprietary collection of ad formats). I led the UI/UX design for the project, part of a small team made up of my Design Manager, the Director of Engineering, and a few engineers. I worked directly with our Head of Product to iterate on his wireframes and create high fidelity designs that satisfied user needs and business goals. Without dedicated QA support, I also provided continuous testing and feedback as our engineers built out the SSP.
Context & Goals
Since launching in 2016, Concert - Vox Media’s advertising marketplace - has amassed a significant portfolio of premium publishers such as Condé Nast, Hearst, The Atlantic, and NBCUniversal. If you also include our O&O editorial brands, Concert reaches about 90% of the US digital population with its high impact Athena ads. But it relied on third party vendors to manage programmatic buying, and that was cutting into profits and control over the experience. Dedicated to investing further in their successful software, Vox decided to remove the “middle man” and build their own supply-side platform. Known internally as the Deals App, the SSP would be integrated into the existing suite of advertising tools using the established design library wherever possible.
As lead product designer, I was responsible for:
Translating wireframes into high fidelity designs and solidifying the architecture of the page
Designing elegant user-friendly solutions to several complex flows
Adapting and/or adding to our existing design library for this new use case
Ensuring a scalable UX for future enhancements
The Research
In order to design the Deals App, I first needed to wrap my head around what an SSP was. Our Head of Product was an invaluable source of knowledge on the entire ecosystem. In addition to providing the initial wireframes, he walked the team through all the technical aspects of programmatic bidding, highlighting what information our users would provide in order to initiate a deal and then how our SSP would integrate with our partner DSP to make it all happen. I learned that the lifecycle of the deal will include many interim states, as there tends to be several revisions to the initial deal terms. With all the people interacting with the deal, a way to track ongoing actions would also be useful.
I also did as much competitive research as I could on other SSPs (such Xandr and Google Adx), though without individual accounts my access to them was limited.
[wireframes]
Design Process
Since the SSP should feel like it was a part of Vox’s existing advertising software, I pulled from our extensive design system when working on the UI. This included more basic elements, like button and dropdown styles, to complex micro-interactions like filtering. Having an established library means I can design more efficiently and focus my time on solving new UX challenges. Any new components used the same design language as our other tooling and were saved to our central Product Language document in Figma. This document was the team’s source of truth for all things design and I made sure it was always updated with the latest versions of all design components.
[main UI with callouts on shared design components]
The UX for the SSP was quite complex, and it was essential to collaborate with product and engineering on an ongoing basis. I led weekly reviews with the team so I could validate my assumptions in real time and address any concerns immediately. Beyond the central user flow of creating and modifying a deal, there were several edge cases and interim states that needed to be designed. The UI also had micro-interactions that I included as flows for our engineering team so everything was super clear when I passed my designs off.
[example of a flow broken down]
The Outcome
[video of live Deals app]
The Concert SSP successfully launched without incident in October of 2022. Without dedicated QA resources, it was a true team effort to iron out all the functionality before going live. I continued to provide design support post-launch by working on improvements based on initial user feedback. These mostly concerned expanded control and guidance for audience targeting.
One of the larger enhancements was the Deals Library, a place for users to bid on curated groupings of Concert inventory. With this new feature I designed two additional user flows - one for our sales teams to build a deal with defined presets and save it as a “package,” and another for SSP users to choose one of these packages to launch a new deal from. The Deals Library made it even easier to target a specific user audience, increasing productivity and efficiency when bidding on our programmatic inventory.