An Ads Manager for a platform banks actually run on
Where 'make it usable' actually means 'map every state before designing any screen' — because the user is a bank's marketing team.
Cardlytics runs advertising, promotions, and cashback directly inside banks' digital channels — a platform-as-a-service where the user is a bank's marketing team and a broken workflow means a bank-facing product breaks. I worked on the Ads Manager: the tool bank partners and brand advertisers use to publish and manage campaigns.
Context
The core difficulty was structural, not visual. Ads Manager needed customer segmentation, detailed parameterization, and data visualization for analysis — with real edge cases: a segment with zero matches, a campaign with conflicting parameters, a partial data load. Usability here meant mapping every state before designing any screen.
What I did
I mapped flows before screens and prioritized by business impact and technical feasibility with PMs and engineers, since not every edge case earns equal design investment. The real achievement was resolving genuinely complex campaign-management views into something a bank's marketing team could actually operate — and refining components that fed back into the platform's broader design system.
Visuals
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