FUSIO by Locala is a powerful drive-to-store platform that can attribute digital media investments with real-world results, such as shopper visits into stores. Our product vision is to help our clients, marketers, brands and media agencies, to close the digital and physical advertising divide.

FUSIO’s platform users are programmatic media traders who buy ad spaces at auctions in the ad exchange (automated ad space buying and selling to the highest bidder).

 

 

Our product team has the primary mission to deliver a B2B product with functions and features that appeal to both primary employees using the product, “users”, as well as business decision makers in the buying process, “choosers”*. FUSIO’s product design has to win over both of these stakeholders. For “choosers”, FUSIO offers more distinct features than the competition. For the “user”, FUSIO addresses specific daily challenges and provides an easy-to-adopt solution.  

Let’s not forget that B2B users have different goals than B2C users. So first, we tried to understand the employee mindset and identify the challenges of our target users in their career contexts. These challenges are related to each user’s personal motivations and to the various advertising-related tasks.

The first key finding is that our target users want a product to help them become better at their jobs. Thus, the primary goal was to provide a tool that can facilitate exactly that. Ultimately our target users want to progress in their career, do their jobs better and more efficiently to eventually spend time on what really matters.

This translates into two important product objectives:

  1. Speed of execution: being able to get things done quickly
  2. Feedback and constraints: avoid time consuming  mistakes

In order to get a holistic understanding of our target user’s daily advertising-related operational tasks, we conducted “contextual interviews” during our user research period of several months. This helped our team to understand their pain points and learn more about their current solutions – what really works and areas that can be improved.

Our primary research revealed ways in which media traders understood and worked with different elements of a programmatic advertising campaign. These included specific tasks, good and bad habits, preferences and dislikes, as well as features they wish they had to improve their job scope.

These “contextual interviews” provided valuable data for our product team to analyse and recognise patterns in order to build the conceptual model for how media traders reasoned, worked and behaved.

User-centric findings and design examples

  1. Spreadsheet Functionality: We learned that very often, after the media trader downloads a report, they would need to export these data into a spreadsheet tool in order to apply a filtered-view and group the data. Knowing this, we integrated a function into FUSIO to allow table manipulations within the interface to help the user avoid the additional action of exporting the downloaded data into another spreadsheet tool. With this added functionality, the user spends less time transitioning between work tools and achieves their final goal faster.
  2. Quick Edit: We also realised that traders need a shortcut directly in the campaign dashboard to make configuration adjustments while they are monitoring their campaign performances. So in our design thinking, we created a bridge to group  the two visualisation options (edit and monitoring) so the user can alternate between the two modes easily.

These tool-independent workflows that we identified came together to form the FUSIO conceptual model, shaping the entire design of the platform. This way, users can navigate intuitively in FUSIO and carry on their tasks with a seamless transition.

Next in the series, our product team will deep dive into FUSIO’s conceptual model and design.

*Nielsen Norman Group Report