Tailwind

Tailwind Ads

New Product Offering

2023

Expanding Tailwind
‍Tailwind is your all-in-one tool for small businesses made to feel like a marketing team. Easily plan, manage, create, and batch-schedule social posts to grow your business and reach the right audience.
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Heading into 2023, Tailwind was looking to grow its offering and narrow in on an existing user base, e-commerce users. With this, the team launched a new offering, Tailwind Ads, allowing users to create and manage, with the help of AI, social ads across different networks for their business.

My Responsibilities

I was tasked with discovering opportunities alongside our project manager and UX researcher for Tailwind ads by looking at existing data, conducting user interviews, and highlighting user pain points to increase user adoption.
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Below I highlighted a series of those improvements which ultimately decreased the amount of time between $1k in ad revenue from 7 weeks to 2 weeks and increased our ads conversion rate by 61% over six months.

Opportunity Mapping

After releasing an MVP to beta users, gathering feedback via continuous user interviews, and measuring against existing data, the team was able to establish an opportunity map to help dictate where the best possible opportunities were to make improvements to the existing product. I was a part of the discussions, bringing context from existing user feedback.

A guiding business metric was established alongside product outcomes to gauge the success of Tailwind Ads; to increase the number of concurrent paying ad customers.

Exercise map of opportunities for the Tailwind ads product.

Looking Closer at an Opportunity

Users often lacked confidence when it came to running ads with Tailwind. This was either due to a lack of understanding of advertising for their business or the need for the ad content to be tailored to their specific needs.

I believed that by instilling greater confidence during the ad review process, it would encourage users to set their ads live.

Customer Journey Map

Before making any improvements, I first created a customer journey map. This helped me gain a better understanding of the problem space by examining existing user feedback. The map revealed that after the onboarding process, users were confused about what to do next.

Goals

We needed improved communication devices to inform users about what to do after completing the onboarding process and setting their first ad live. It was also crucial to provide users with the appropriate controls when reviewing the ads we created for them, in order to build confidence in the product.

Old UI of the Draft Ads page in Tailwind.

Updated UI of the Draft ads page in Tailwind.

Enabling Better Communication

Users landed on the draft ads page with no direction as to what to do next after completing their setup. Adding a stepper element to the page plus additional CTAs for quick access to communication and education allowed users to stay engaged with the product post-onboarding.

The Stepper Element

One of the bigger problems to solve was limiting the amount of information present, but still allowing for visibility into what to do and what to expect.

The stepper was designed into five major steps, with the first being completed after onboarding to give the user a sense of progress. Each step has a hover state giving more in-depth feedback.

I learned from interviews, that one of the biggest pain points was users not knowing how Tailwind manages their ads. Adding a link to one of our knowledge base articles would allow users to learn more about the subject.

UI view of the Ads Dashboard page in Tailwind.

Expanding Communication

In addition to the draft ads page, utilizing the dashboard empty state helped direct and inform users what actions to take next in their journey. The dashboard view was repurposed to give insight into what metrics to expect when they set their first ad live, education on Tailwind ads in the form of knowledge base articles, and most importantly take users to the draft ads page where they can start the ad review process.

The Editing Experience

Before users set their first ad live, we encouraged them to review the ads we have generated from their products. Three key factors came to fruition after multiple interview sessions.

It was important for users to see how the ad would look for their audience. Secondly, even though Tailwind selected the product image and generated all of the ad copy, users still wanted editing controls for the ads. Third, users wanted clarity into the type of ad(s) they would be running.

Close up of UI elements in Tailwind ads.

The Overview

Users could see a preview of the ad on the left-hand side of the editing container. In addition, an info tooltip detailed the purpose of the ad for the user and how it will impact their business once live. Network icons were added as small visual elements to give the user a cue to where the ad set would show.

If needed, the user could also set the ad live directly from this view; removing the necessity of backing out of their edits if they only wanted to set one ad live.

The Layout

Scheduling content is Tailwind's bread and butter. There was no reason to introduce a new UX flow that users would be unfamiliar with when looking at our QuickScheduler. Utilizing the existing layout from that section of the app saved both time and effort on the design and dev side.

Editing Controls

Ad copy content is prefilled for the user with the ease of use to quickly update what has been generated. Users can make quick edits in the input fields or use the Regenerate Ad Copy button to completely change what we have written them.

This helped users save time and effort when trying to come up with ad copy on their own.

Old version of a UI component in Tailwind ads.

Updated UI of a component in Tailwind ads.

Getting Users Over the Hump

The last step before setting an ad live is to approve service fees. During continuous discovery calls ample amounts of feedback came up during this step including questions and confusion around the modal.

How much will I be charged? What if I change my mind? What's my budget? What can I expect afterward?

By introducing a better visual hierarchy, calling attention to certain elements, and subduing others, users are quickly able to identify the core aspects of their ad summary before being set live.

Thinking Beyond

There are plenty more incremental improvements to make to the product. More notably, in my opinion, is expanding the reach of Tailwind ads to other sections of the app to capture a larger percentage of the user base, increase engagement, and ultimately conversion rate.