Introduction
As a UX Designer at Google, my role focuses on creating advertiser experiences that connect creators, customers and businesses. I am responsible for designing tools that allow advertisers to effectively create YouTube campaigns. In my work, I closely collaborate with a multi-disciplinary team, including UX researchers, UX writers, Product Managers, Engineers, and the YouTube Ads leadership team.
Key contributions through multiple projects:
Improving the Campaign Creation Flow
The existing campaign creation flow was complex, often overwhelming new users and missing features caused frictions for experienced users. Advertisers needed a seamless, intuitive process to create and optimize their video campaigns.
Enhancing Accessibility:
The advertising platform needed to be more inclusive, ensuring that users with varying disabilities could navigate and interact with the tools effectively. This included considerations such as screen reader compatibility, intuitive keyboard navigation, and appropriate contrast levels for text and visual elements.
Improving video creatives with AI:
Many advertisers were missing vertical videos, which are key for campaign success on mobile screens and vertical ad formats such as YouTube Shorts Ads. With the help of AutoFlip, an AI framework for intelligent video reframing, advertisers can now easily get vertical videos for their campaigns.
Solution
Campaign Creation Flow Redesign:
Users were often not having all of the information needed when they first started creating campaigns. They were not knowing the final approved budget or were even missing the video ad. I collaborated with Product Managers and Engineers to introduce Drafts, allowing users to save their campaigns and continue them at a later point in time. Further, we've improved the Video Ad Previews and provided UX frameworks for the Ad creation and Campaign success page. These changes made the ad creation process faster, clearer, and more intuitive.
Focus on Accessibility:
Accessibility has been a core part of every project we do at Google. We conducted accessibility audits to identify issues in the user interface (UI). Working with Engineers, we've improved keyboard navigation and hierarchy, ensured all visual elements, such as buttons and menus, had proper color contrast and could be easily navigated by screen readers. Together with UX writers, we ensured the language used in the interface was simple, clear and avoiding jargon. These improvements were crucial in creating a more inclusive experience for all users.
AI-Driven Video Enhancement:
To enhance the quality of ad creatives, I collaborated with the engineering and product management team to integrate AI-powered features that use computer vision to analyze video content and automatically transform horizontal videos into vertical and square video. So that the videos can be used for a wide variety of devices (TV, Desktop and Mobile) and ad formats (in-stream, Shorts, in-feed).
Source: AutoFlip: An Open Source Framework for Intelligent Video Reframing
Collaboration
Throughout the projects, my work was deeply collaborative. I regularly interact with UX researchers to gather insights from users, refining designs based on their feedback. With UX writers, we crafted language that was concise yet informative, ensuring users get the right information at the right point in time. Product Managers were key partners in prioritizing features, transforming them into roadmaps and understanding the broader business context. Engineers helped translate designs into functional, scalable solutions and are key to understand the complex technical landscape to find the best possible solution within the technical constraints we might have. During my regular interactions with the YouTube ads leadership I ensure alignment with strategic goals and priorities, and keep the projects moving in the right direction.
Impact
These projects and improvements have led to significant impact, benefitting Creators, Businesses and Advertisers. I'm especially proud on the following impact I've had so far:
- Provided multiple workshops to train the team on accessibility.
- Had a significant impact on the teams culture to work with MVP's and experiments.
- Drove significant revenue +XXXM ARR
Conclusion
As a UX designer at Google, my work on YouTube Ads has provided me with the opportunity to make a tangible impact on both the user experience and the broader business goals. By focusing on improving the campaign creation flow, enhancing accessibility, and incorporating AI-powered features for video enhancement, I’ve contributed to making YouTube Ads more effective, inclusive, and user-friendly for a diverse set of advertisers. Through close collaboration with cross-functional teams, we were able to deliver innovative solutions that improve the overall advertiser experience on one of the world’s most influential platforms.