The problem:
Nobody likes advertising. Despite anyone's best efforts, advertising is a nuisance to most people. For this project, my team of 4 was tasked with the challenge of trying to make advertising less of a nuisance, and more of a convenience. So, the question we found ourselves asking was "In a perfect "Walgreens" world, how can we make advertising a positive, helpful tool?"
Design
Test
Repeat
"Test don't guess"
- Motto to live by
The plan
After resolving what the issues were, we discussed how we'd attempt to fix them. Users have never had a reason to trust advertising. It's also often irrelevant to their lives, and the moment they're currently living in while scrolling. We needed to find ways to target them contextually, and in a way that wouldn't make them feel their privacy was being invaded. How can we get users to trust advertisements? How can we directly target users based on what we know about them, without making them question how we knew what they'd like? How about we just ask them. We do it by being as transparent as possible; involve them in the process. Advertising is mandatory. Let's at least make it useful and fun!
Give USERS the control.
The product
We continued exploring the possibilities. The widget would be transparent to the user by listing what we already think their interests are. It would give them the option to thumbs-up or down the ad being shown, and allow them to edit their ad preferences by selecting/deselecting from a list of interests. They'd be given an anonymous animal avatar based on their category of interests, like a tiger, and have an account to go into anytime to get as specific or as vague as they want. This would be a fun, colorful, and inviting design.
Create a widget that would live around the ad itself on a page. This widget is essentially a control panel for the user to take the wheel on their advertising experience.
What would this look like? Let the sketching and ideas begin! The First iterations were exploring how the widget would be introduced to the user. Where would it live on the page? Would it be animated?
Throughout the preliminary stages of sketching and wire-framing, we conducted many user tests. Before we had anything tangible, we conducted surveys to find out if people were interested in the concept itself, and if it's something they would use. We got positive feedback, and a lot of great constructive criticism along the way. After narrowing it down to the ideas that worked the best, we took it to the next level. We made iPhone cutouts with our ideas sketched out, and took them to Starbucks with a handful of $5 Starbucks gift cards to offer for live feedback on our prototypes.
At this point we were ready to begin rapid prototyping. We experimented with the Avatar concept, and even considered making it an app that people could download and use as they please. For this product's test run we decided to do A/B testing using static ads versus a new parallax ad format we designed. I made some rapid prototypes to demonstrate how these would work.
We also experimented with implementing a separate idea we had previously had into this widget experience. An ad reward system. Users could access a hub of ads at a time that's convenient for them, and view/interact with ads to build up points. These points could earn things like 'ad free time' on our site, or a data incentive reward.
Branding
"Mize" combines the “mi” of mine with the suffix -ize (to make). Has a light and slangy vibe similar to the way the younger generation shorten words: Mize could be an abbreviation of “customize,” “maximize,” “optimize.”
Last iterations
Final Product
After lots of testing, countless versions and edits, we decided to use a more minimal approach. We took away the app and the profile features to start out with. The final product contained the thumbs up/down feature, what interests we think the user has, and contains a list of interests the user can toggle on or off. Pressing the thumbs down automatically replaces the ad shown with a new one. The widget lives around the ad, and the entire interface exists here; it would not take the user away to another website or app. It is editable in real time.
