Sovrn Meridian Publisher Dashboard: Power to the Publishers!

Brighter Side helped Sovrn imagine and design a dashboard that allowed web publishers to maximize revenue derived from digital advertising. After acquiring Federated Media’s programmatic advertising division, Sovrn sought to vitalize the publisher experience and bring to market a robust dashboard toolset that allowed publishers to enhance revenues. Doing so would engage them in the Sovrn programmatic ecosystem, benefiting both publishers and Sovrn.

User Research: What do Users Really Want?

Conducting interviews with publishers allowed Brighter Side to develop design personas that covered a range of demographics, psychographics, and need states. From the weekly posting mommy bloggers to publishers of considerable scale, including Uncrate (then on the Sovrn programmatic platform), Brighter Side developed five design personas that communicated the functional and aspirational design insights that lead to the initial design concepts.

To understand how the design personas might engage with the tools, and to better understand the contexts within which those tools would be used, Brighter Side developed a series of user journeys. The user journeys brought the personas to life, illustrating not only what data might be valuable, but the need states that drove the inquiries to begin with.

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UX Design: Align Insight to Functionality

Once Brighter Side and Sovrn agreed on the types of tools and data that publishers wanted, the UX design process was underway. But before delving into Sketch (the defacto UX design tool before Figma), we went through a week-long design sprint using nothing but paper sketches. Why? Because paper sketches are the quickest, most effective method of getting the bad ideas out of the way.

Once the sketch sprint concluded, Brighter Side got to work on designing high-fidelity prototypes that turned web advertising data into insights. During interviews with publishers of all sizes, I learned that the most important piece of data was revenue. After all, every publisher is in the business of monetizing content.

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Testing: Is the Product Useful, Usable, and Compelling?

After three weeks of high-fidelity UX design, we took the prototype to a publisher’s summit in San Francisco and recruited ten publishers to help with testing. The key to testing was ensuring the prototype was robust enough to communicate key functionality but still rough enough to invite participants to explore its features and communicate their likes and dislikes. Sometimes participants, when reviewing a fully-polished prototype, can withhold information fearing that either it’s too late or that the product isn’t intended for them.

Insights from testing helped drive the final design sprints that led to a very successful product launch. Constantly iterated, the original design was retired in 2021 after eight years of valuable use.