August 24, 2021
Adform has recently received a Red Dot Award in the Interface and User Experience category for our reimagined product platform —Adform FLOW. This award is a huge honor, and anyone familiar with design will attest that the Red Dot Awards are one of the most widely recognized professional design competitions in the world. Previous recipients include BMW, IKEA, and Sony among many other leading brands.
With roughly 20,000 submissions annually, the Red Dot Awards continue to be a much sought-after stamp of approval. 1955 marked the first year that a jury came together to evaluate the best designs of that era; since then, the prestigious distinction “Red Dot” has been a seal of outstanding design that is highly regarded internationally.
This award is a testament to our client-focused approach to technology, and our central mission to reduce complexity in the ad tech ecosystem. By designing an intuitive platform, that guides users along campaign workflows with AI-driven recommendations, our goal was to give clients a clear and holistic overview of the campaign life cycle and help them drive optimization in the simplest conceivable way.
Our UX Mission
Our UI was formed as part of the development of Adform FLOW, the latest iteration of our platform. Adform FLOW brings point solutions, such as the DMP, DSP, Ad Server, SSP, and DCO, under a common platform and shared UX. It also reduces complexity by ensuring the industry’s multiple inventory partners and media types are accessible and easy to activate.
To realize this vision for our platform, Adform required a UX that bucked B2B norms and drew inspiration from B2C usage models; creating digital campaigns should ultimately be as easy as online shopping. This user-first approach required a task-orientated system, where a personalized, adaptive dashboard presented tasks in an intuitive way.
Our Design Process
The purpose of Adform FLOW was to build technology that works for marketers, rather than making marketers work to unlock the value of technology. Taking the widely varied nature of today’s marketing landscape into account, Adform conducted over 200 interviews with media professionals and synthesized a persona framework of 12 profiles. As such, Adform FLOW can cater to all individual roles and responsibilities within marketing organizations, with a customized user experience for each. The pain points and needs expressed by these users fed into the design process, and customer journey maps were created to act as a basis for defining the main workflows.
The Outcome
The result of the Adform FLOW UI is improved efficiency, reduced learning curves, less fatigue, and the ability for users to act on real-time opportunities. Platform users can move intuitively through the system and focus on outcomes, rather than technology. A recent audit from PwC revealed huge 24-60% efficiency gains, and Gartner Peer Insights illustrates the platform’s effectiveness in creating operational efficiencies and improving process outcomes.
One of the core principles of UX design is simplicity. In an industry that is increasingly complex, being recognized for our ability to efficiently streamline the planning, activation, and optimization of media campaigns is hugely significant. This Red Dot Award is further proof of our capacity to enable effortless modern marketing.