Geolink
The highest performing self-service location-based advertising platform available today
Summary
Geolink is a web-based self-serve advertising platform that empowers advertisers and SMBs to plan, target, launch, track and optimize their mobile campaigns at a glimpse.
My Role
I acted as a Design Lead, also the only designer of the company, working closely with cross-functional teams throughout the end-to-end process. It was also the first time this company shipped a consumer-facing SaaS solution. We launched Geolink in August 2017 and it's driven huge business success since then.
What I did
Established visual identity systems and product style guides
Led market & user research and usability testing efforts
Delivered information architecture, user flows, use cases, wireframes, high-fidelity UI, prototypes, and more
Worked as Design Lead with a team of 17 from research, ideation, team formation, to completion
Established an efficient and effective agile process & workflow across Product, QA, and Engineering teams
The Outcome — Demo Video
Source: thinknear.com/about-geolink
01
Introduction
The Problem: “How do we empower users to achieve more with less by enhancing the efficiency of our ad-buying process, clearly communicating our service offerings, and satisfying the unmet user needs in the market?”
🏢 The business problem
The company and the teams were lack of efficiency in the ads buying process as well as clarity in marketing and communications.
☹️ From a human perspective
Both internal users and the business were in need of transformation to serve more innovative and strategic value propositions.
🤩 My design thinking
I acted as a bridge connecting people, the business, and technologies and developed the approach below.
My Approach
Exercise the creative muscle of the company, collaboratively
Establish ownership, trust, and an environment open for ideas and feedback
Establish a sound taxonomy and clear prioritization for a more streamlined and easy-to-use user experience.
Constantly collect data and user feedback to validate designs, fuel new ideas, and foster long-term innovations throughout the roadmap
02
Research
I took an integrated quantitative & qualitative research approach, throughout the full product life cycle.
I led research activities such as user & stakeholder interviews, insight synthesis, competitive & market landscape audit, shadowing, session recording, journey mapping, quantitative & qualitative research, and more.
I developed areas of focus and key user pain points after the initial research, e.g., we found out that users don’t understand the company's service offerings, and the steps to take to launch a campaign. The current-state experience was full of frictions, frustrating, and wearisome.
03
Information Architecture
I started with user flows, aiming to remove frictions and streamline the process, and then mapped out role settings & permissions, which informed the sitemap.
I worked closely with engineers to iterate and validate information architecture. It's critical to establish clear information architecture upfront for enterprise/business tools.
For the taxonomy effort, I conducted card sorting exercise, user testing with prototypes, and synthesized insights. The user feedback also informed my design direction for the design system. (e.g., Users didn't like the version with iconology and said, "We just want to get the job done quickly with this tool. No need to introduce fancy visuals.")
Insights gathered from these activities set the foundation for our key product offerings. See “Targeting Features“ below.
04
Targeting Features
These are the key targeting features, which are vital product offerings of Geolink. The above visuals are educational “flyers” in our on-boarding portal.
With these features, Geolink can help customers to easily target people who are currently within 200 m of Starbucks in San Francisco, along with behaviors and interests such as “pets,” “movies,” and so on. I designed to make sophisticated advertising capabilities easy to understand and use.
05
Design Systems
I crafted every detail of the visual identity system and style guide for the brand, the product, and more. It was an evolution that every step matters. Note: During the beta launch, the product was named “Thinklab” but later on changed to “Geolink.”
I worked closely with dev teams to iterate and validate the design on staging. The process was efficient and collaborative.
In my first few months in the company, I also wrote CSS and HTML since it was a small team. That hands-on experience helped me to understand the engineering workflow. When we scaled up later on, I can better work with dev to ship quality and reusable CSS styles and components.
06
The Outcome
Thinknear hit record revenue within three months of the launch of Geolink. We had substantial growth in numbers of users, advertisers, and campaigns. So from a business perspective, it’s a success.
From a human perspective, I aimed to make users’ life at work easier, and I achieved that too. During my a year and 7 months in this company, I acted as Design Lead throughout the process, and as the only one designer in a tech company of 100+ employees, in the early days, I was even responsible for CSS styles and some HTML elements. It was not easy, but I always got the "Challenge Accepted!" mindset, and I really loved to learn and listen to my colleagues, which I believe was aspirational and encouraging to the entire company.
My personality and due diligence helped me to establish trust among peers and shared ownership together, which helped a lot to stretch the creative muscle of the company, by doing so, we get to “humanize business tools” collaboratively.
I later transited to work as Design Lead, focusing more on product design along with proper planning and roadmap. I was fortunate to learn and grow with everyone in the company, gather product feedback from them, and make key decisions on every detail of visual styles, interactions, and features. It was tons of responsibilities but worths it.
“Knowledge can be learned, but trust must be earned.” — This is my takeaway from this work experience.