Source Digital — simplifying a campaigns platform

An ad-tech platform that required a full sales team to onboard every client. The goal was to make it self-serve — without losing the flexibility power users depended on.

Source Digital campaigns platform — campaign summary screen

Context

Source Digital provides programmatic and contextual advertising for publishers across mobile, web, and CTV. Historically, every new client required hands-on support from the sales team to set up campaigns — a process that was a bottleneck to growth and impossible to scale.

Research methods

3 combined

Users interviewed

5 + sales team

Post-launch iteration

3 weeks

The redesign needed to make campaign creation intuitive enough for clients to complete independently — while accounting for a legacy feature set built piecemeal for individual clients, with limited documentation and unclear usage data.

Problem

💡 The platform required a human in the loop for every onboarding. That wasn't a people problem — it was a design problem.

Competitors kept their UIs hidden before onboarding, making benchmarking difficult. Quantitative usage data was scarce. The challenge was to design for scalability with limited visibility into how the existing platform was actually being used.

Approach

With limited quantitative data available, I built a qualitative and comparative research foundation:

User interviews — conducted 5 interviews with marketing professionals experienced in campaign creation tools, identifying the most critical features and pain points

Sales team collaboration — engaged the sales team as primary users given their deep involvement in campaign setup; surfaced operational friction and feature gaps directly from daily use

Competitive analysis — analysed UI patterns from indirect competitors to identify industry standards and design conventions users would already recognise

Design decisions

Stepper for campaign creation

Replaced a single dense form with a step-by-step flow, directly addressing sales team feedback about the cognitive load of editing campaigns. Breaking the process into stages reduced information overload and made progress legible.

Campaign dashboard with at-a-glance overview

Added a central hub with basic analytics, a "campaigns to watch" section, and a calendar widget — surfacing the status information users were previously hunting for manually.

Progressive disclosure for complex settings

Advanced and edge-case settings were moved into secondary tabs, keeping the primary interface uncluttered while preserving flexibility for power users who needed it.

Ship, learn, iterate

Given the uncertain feature landscape — many settings had been built for individual clients with unclear usage — we launched the MVP intentionally imperfect, with a plan to gather real-world feedback before cutting anything.

Outcome

Three weeks post-launch, I ran follow-up interviews with the sales team to identify what could be further simplified. Key changes from that round:

Targeting broken into clearer sub-sections, reducing perceived complexity

Campaigns defaulted to uncapped — the most common real-world scenario

Activations section reordered ahead of programmatic to match user mental model

Less-used settings moved to advanced tabs, reducing noise in the primary flow

Reflection

This project sharpened my instinct for when to ship versus when to wait. With a small user base and limited usage data, the most valuable research came after launch — not before. Closer engineering collaboration earlier would have saved time spent reverse-engineering which features were actually in use. The lesson: in ambiguous legacy systems, the fastest path to clarity is often a working product in real hands.