Clearing the way for Spotify Advertising
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PROBLEM
Ad Studio, Spotify's Self Serve ads booking experience, launched in 2017. Since then, Ad Studio expanded into global markets, built various ad formats, and made it possible for teams to collaborate within the platform. Ad Studio's navigation was sparse, burying critical user tasks and leading to low completion rates. We set out to improve the Ad Studio user experience and prepare the product for upcoming waves of innovation.

HYPOTHESIS
Expose clear paths to actions within Ad Studio’s top 3 behavioral modes to enable better wayfinding, team collaboration, and task completion by improving navigation across 1st and 2nd-level surfaces.

ROLE
Design Owner

DELIVERABLES
Redesigned Navigation
Proposal for next steps

TEAM
UX Writer
UX Researcher

Buried paths to critical user tasks

The circuitous routing of ad creation and reporting keeps advertisers from using many of our new, powerful features

Unpredictable interactions create confusion, reducing the likelihood of successful task completion

We asked ourselves:

How might we build a clear, unified navigation system to match the complexity of our capabilities and user needs?

Our hypothesis:

Expose clear paths to actions within Ad Studio’s top 3 behavioral modes to enable better wayfinding, team collaboration, and task completion by improving navigation across 1st and 2nd-level surfaces

We identified three critical usability problems:

Unpredictable navigation

Inconsistent L1 labels and a global nav that changes depending on the page make it easy to get lost in Ad Studio. The previous experience lacked affordances and created a confusing experience.

Buried pages make tasks hard to complete

Billing, account settings, and team management pages are buried at page levels 3 and 4. Not only do we ask too many clicks of the user, we obscure important actions with hover-state buttons.

IA didn't reflect "account" mental models

The previous IA disconnected account details/settings from the active account. Account details for the selected account were difficult to find because they were not housed at the same level as the other account-specific entities (campaigns, assets, etc). This exacerbated the issues of inconsistent navigation labels and buried pages.

Solution:

Re-organize Ad Studio’s site architecture and create a global navigation that can scale as Spotify Advertising grows