May 12, 2022
Improving usability for Perpetua's activity stream
My Role
Lead UX designer and researcher
Duration
~1 Month
Team Members
Mikayla Martorano (Product Designer), Jake Assidao (Product Designer), Nael ElShawwa (VP Engineering), Paul George (Director of Engineering), Mark Oosterveld (Lead Engineer), Rosco Hill (Chief AI Officer)
About Perpetua
Perpetua is a self-serve, B2B software built to optimize advertising performance for online marketplaces like Amazon. Using Perpetua's "goal" approach to advertising, customers can launch and manage ads with ease allowing them to focus more on strategy and less on manual tactics.
Perpetua customers include brands, sellers, agencies, and aggregators. While brands and sellers generally have one or two individuals on their internal team responsible for ads, agencies and aggregators manage multiple accounts in the Perpetua app.
Perpetua's Activity Stream
Perpetua's activity stream lists all events performed in an account, with the most recent changes at the top. This helps users understand ad performance by comparing data with activity changes over a set period of time.
Due to the volume of changes that can be made in accounts each day, users were experiencing difficulty finding specific activity items, and had to scroll endlessly to locate relevant events.
Understanding the root of the problem
To identify the most important feature gaps, I analyzed relevant pain-points logged by existing customers and conducted an internal brainstorm across customer success and product teams.
Users need to locate activity items by activity type
Through this brainstorm, I identified four key methods users employ when trying to pinpoint specific activities. Users need to easily locate activity items based on:
Date: To track activities impacting performance within a specific time period.
User email: Many accounts are managed by teams with multiple users. Identifying activities by email would simplify identification of personal vs. team activities.
Ad type: Each ad type has a distinct strategy and budget. Users need to identify activities that apply to each type including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP (Amazon's Demand Side Platform).
Activity type: Identifying activities by type would help users understand performance at different levels of granularity. For example, when looking at performance for a specific keyword, users want to be able to find activity that is relevant to that view, including bid adjustments or status changes.
Using activity stream filters, users can now easily locate activities based on any of the characteristics set above.
Activity items should be relevant to performance that users are viewing
The intention of Perpetua's activity stream is to store a running history of all changes made by users in an account. This means that there can be a lot of activity items to navigate through.
By automatically applying pre-set filters based on where the user has navigated to in the app, we reduce manual work needed to find the most relevant information. For example, when users click into a goal and open the activity stream, items are pre-filtered for the selected goal and ad type.
Users need to easily identify activity type when scanning multiple items in the list
The previous activity item anatomy included goal title as the primary header, with ad type and details below. We received feedback that this made digesting stacked items very difficult, especially since users often look at activities within one goal at a time, making the repeated goal title in the header redundant.
In the updated activity item anatomy, users can easily understand what each item relates to by reading a summary at the top.
Measuring impact and identifying next steps
The pain-points addressed in this project impacted a large number of customers, including many high-value accounts. While we do not currently track activity-related interactions in the app, we have received an abundant amount of positive, qualitative feedback from existing customers around these improvements.
Next, the team plans to create more granular identification for each unique activity type. There are still numerous activity items that lack specificity and use a generic label on the backend such as "Goal Updated". The team is currently working to map these remaining events to offer users even more robust activity item filtering / summaries.
May 12, 2022
Improving usability for Perpetua's activity stream
My Role
Lead UX designer and researcher
Duration
~1 Month
Team Members
Mikayla Martorano (Product Designer), Jake Assidao (Product Designer), Nael ElShawwa (VP Engineering), Paul George (Director of Engineering), Mark Oosterveld (Lead Engineer), Rosco Hill (Chief AI Officer)
About Perpetua
Perpetua is a self-serve, B2B software built to optimize advertising performance for online marketplaces like Amazon. Using Perpetua's "goal" approach to advertising, customers can launch and manage ads with ease allowing them to focus more on strategy and less on manual tactics.
Perpetua customers include brands, sellers, agencies, and aggregators. While brands and sellers generally have one or two individuals on their internal team responsible for ads, agencies and aggregators manage multiple accounts in the Perpetua app.
Perpetua's Activity Stream
Perpetua's activity stream lists all events performed in an account, with the most recent changes at the top. This helps users understand ad performance by comparing data with activity changes over a set period of time.
Due to the volume of changes that can be made in accounts each day, users were experiencing difficulty finding specific activity items, and had to scroll endlessly to locate relevant events.
Understanding the root of the problem
To identify the most important feature gaps, I analyzed relevant pain-points logged by existing customers and conducted an internal brainstorm across customer success and product teams.
Users need to locate activity items by activity type
Through this brainstorm, I identified four key methods users employ when trying to pinpoint specific activities. Users need to easily locate activity items based on:
Date: To track activities impacting performance within a specific time period.
User email: Many accounts are managed by teams with multiple users. Identifying activities by email would simplify identification of personal vs. team activities.
Ad type: Each ad type has a distinct strategy and budget. Users need to identify activities that apply to each type including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP (Amazon's Demand Side Platform).
Activity type: Identifying activities by type would help users understand performance at different levels of granularity. For example, when looking at performance for a specific keyword, users want to be able to find activity that is relevant to that view, including bid adjustments or status changes.
Using activity stream filters, users can now easily locate activities based on any of the characteristics set above.
Activity items should be relevant to performance that users are viewing
The intention of Perpetua's activity stream is to store a running history of all changes made by users in an account. This means that there can be a lot of activity items to navigate through.
By automatically applying pre-set filters based on where the user has navigated to in the app, we reduce manual work needed to find the most relevant information. For example, when users click into a goal and open the activity stream, items are pre-filtered for the selected goal and ad type.
Users need to easily identify activity type when scanning multiple items in the list
The previous activity item anatomy included goal title as the primary header, with ad type and details below. We received feedback that this made digesting stacked items very difficult, especially since users often look at activities within one goal at a time, making the repeated goal title in the header redundant.
In the updated activity item anatomy, users can easily understand what each item relates to by reading a summary at the top.
Measuring impact and identifying next steps
The pain-points addressed in this project impacted a large number of customers, including many high-value accounts. While we do not currently track activity-related interactions in the app, we have received an abundant amount of positive, qualitative feedback from existing customers around these improvements.
Next, the team plans to create more granular identification for each unique activity type. There are still numerous activity items that lack specificity and use a generic label on the backend such as "Goal Updated". The team is currently working to map these remaining events to offer users even more robust activity item filtering / summaries.
May 12, 2022
Improving usability for Perpetua's activity stream
My Role
Lead UX designer and researcher
Duration
~1 Month
Team Members
Mikayla Martorano (Product Designer), Jake Assidao (Product Designer), Nael ElShawwa (VP Engineering), Paul George (Director of Engineering), Mark Oosterveld (Lead Engineer), Rosco Hill (Chief AI Officer)
About Perpetua
Perpetua is a self-serve, B2B software built to optimize advertising performance for online marketplaces like Amazon. Using Perpetua's "goal" approach to advertising, customers can launch and manage ads with ease allowing them to focus more on strategy and less on manual tactics.
Perpetua customers include brands, sellers, agencies, and aggregators. While brands and sellers generally have one or two individuals on their internal team responsible for ads, agencies and aggregators manage multiple accounts in the Perpetua app.
Perpetua's Activity Stream
Perpetua's activity stream lists all events performed in an account, with the most recent changes at the top. This helps users understand ad performance by comparing data with activity changes over a set period of time.
Due to the volume of changes that can be made in accounts each day, users were experiencing difficulty finding specific activity items, and had to scroll endlessly to locate relevant events.
Understanding the root of the problem
To identify the most important feature gaps, I analyzed relevant pain-points logged by existing customers and conducted an internal brainstorm across customer success and product teams.
Users need to locate activity items by activity type
Through this brainstorm, I identified four key methods users employ when trying to pinpoint specific activities. Users need to easily locate activity items based on:
Date: To track activities impacting performance within a specific time period.
User email: Many accounts are managed by teams with multiple users. Identifying activities by email would simplify identification of personal vs. team activities.
Ad type: Each ad type has a distinct strategy and budget. Users need to identify activities that apply to each type including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP (Amazon's Demand Side Platform).
Activity type: Identifying activities by type would help users understand performance at different levels of granularity. For example, when looking at performance for a specific keyword, users want to be able to find activity that is relevant to that view, including bid adjustments or status changes.
Using activity stream filters, users can now easily locate activities based on any of the characteristics set above.
Activity items should be relevant to performance that users are viewing
The intention of Perpetua's activity stream is to store a running history of all changes made by users in an account. This means that there can be a lot of activity items to navigate through.
By automatically applying pre-set filters based on where the user has navigated to in the app, we reduce manual work needed to find the most relevant information. For example, when users click into a goal and open the activity stream, items are pre-filtered for the selected goal and ad type.
Users need to easily identify activity type when scanning multiple items in the list
The previous activity item anatomy included goal title as the primary header, with ad type and details below. We received feedback that this made digesting stacked items very difficult, especially since users often look at activities within one goal at a time, making the repeated goal title in the header redundant.
In the updated activity item anatomy, users can easily understand what each item relates to by reading a summary at the top.
Measuring impact and identifying next steps
The pain-points addressed in this project impacted a large number of customers, including many high-value accounts. While we do not currently track activity-related interactions in the app, we have received an abundant amount of positive, qualitative feedback from existing customers around these improvements.
Next, the team plans to create more granular identification for each unique activity type. There are still numerous activity items that lack specificity and use a generic label on the backend such as "Goal Updated". The team is currently working to map these remaining events to offer users even more robust activity item filtering / summaries.