Adthena
Generating $3 million in ARR and helping users increase budgets
Breaking into the US market
Adthena is a market-leading search intelligence solution for paid search advertising. Our mission is to empower marketers to optimally reach, acquire, and retain consumers with ai data-driven search intelligence through a web application.
​
The business goal was to break into the US market to expand our customer base and generate $500k in revenue. Read through my case study to see how we ended up generating $3 million in ARR.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Design Team
2 designers + User researcher
Collaboration
Customers, Product Managers, Engineers, CS & Sales
The biggest UX challenge and goal
What is the best data for us to sell to the US market in order for future retention and how do we visualise this in a way that users can understand the data straight away.
My journey
Discovery
Uncovering needs
Throughout this project, we worked in 2 week sprints with stakeholder reviews each sprint (VP Product, Eng, Design). As this is a new journey for the business to embark on, we knew the project would be highly costly to the business and we had to agree on the risks we are willing to take.
We carried out thorough discovery value research through user interviews. We interviewed 27 customers and internal consultants across multiple industries and personas. We learnt about how they make decisions, what data they have and how they use it and if they use it for reporting purposes.
In person workshop - Princeton, NJ
What did we find out?
We uncovered an overall goal that was the most common across the interviews:
As a user I want to know how to best allocate my budgets across my locations so the business has the most ROI, and conversion of customers and I get an increased budget for the following quarter.
We also created 2 hypotheses for our 2 main personas:
Clive (Our end user)
The purpose of ET is to give Clive a competitive view of their local markets across location segments that better reflect their search campaign strategies.
Bonnie (Our end user's manager)
The purpose of ET is to give Clive a competitive view of their local markets across location segments that better reflect their search campaign strategies.
We created a user journey with a full end to end flow including the interactions our personas have outside of our application.
User journey
Sharing our findings with c-suite
We presented our findings back to the business stakeholders with a clear presentation of the work we have done and our recommendation to launch an MVP into the market.
​
They agreed on our findings are we could move forward to build a new feature.
Initial designs
Let's get sketching
We saw there was a need to create a new feature in our application for our users to see all of their location's data in 1 place. With the help of our business intelligence team and our engineers, we started sketching some initial ideas and developing wireframes in Figma.
We worked closely with our data, data science, BI and engineering teams to mitigate feasibility risks.
​
There are 2 metrics that came out of our research that were the most influential in aiding decision making. Users wanted to see a correlation between these 2 metrics so we came up with different ways to show this.
Final 2 initial sketches to A/B test with customers
We then tested these two ideas with 6 customers showing them both and getting their feedback on which one showed the data in the most digestable and actionable way.
Research
Time for diary study
We understood the risk of spending months building a new feature for a new market, therefore we wanted to mitigate our value risks through a diary study.
​
We worked with out BI team and created a quick tableau prototype of our design and linked it to new data that they engineers had been creating through machine learning.
​
We conducted diary studies with 5 potential customers, through sourcing them on LinkedIn. We gave them the prototype to use for 2 weeks, and asked them to check-in 4 times by writing down what they did and how they actioned the data in our template.
We had 2 sessions over zoom, 1 to start the diary study and another to close it out. These studies helped us prove the value this visualisation can bring to users.
Tableau report and template document for users to record their notes
Findings
Here's a snapshot of few improvement findings:
Clicking on a bar would show me a breakdown with more information about that location, i.e. more metrics and my competitors.
I find myself filtering by the same groups everytime, can you make a quick way for me to get to there.
Would also like to see ‘Impressions” metric next to the spend efficiency bars.
Overall idea of a good efficiency vs a bad, quickly sort or see what these are.
UI development
Adding some colour into design
We updated the designs based on the findings. We then developed the designs with UI and created a prototype using Invision.
We created usability scripts and tested this on 5 users to ensure we mitigated any usability risks over zoom. As we were designing an MVP, we took this opportunity to ask what users might want to see as a development of this feature as well.
​
We finalised the designs and created specifications to hand-over to the engineers. These include all user flows, scenarios and states. We also updated our design system with any new components.
Delivery
Let's break into the US market
The MVP of this feature was delivered to customers.​
​
Within 12 months the company made $3 million in ARR which was directly linked to this feature through new customers and upsells of locations, smashing their $500k goal.