Inline Advertisements
Project Overview
Client: Ansira / Sincro
Product: Inline advertisements for website product listings pages.
https://nissan.sincrowebsites.com/VehicleSearchResults?search=new
Team: Product Owner, UX Designer, Software Engineers (5)
Role: UX Designer – Research, Configurations, Wireframes & Mockups
Timeline: 4 Months
Steps: Project Intake; Research; Wireframes; Mockups; Product testing; Launch
Summary of Requirements
The product owner approached our team with the need to make improvements to the platform’s existing ability to display advertisements on a search results listings page. The problem with the current product was it’s limitation on what content could be displayed as well as style options. It was limited to vehicle incentives and there was only 1 style available platform wide. This project would look into what was being offered by competitors, what was standard on e-commerce listings, and what we could do to offer something similar.
Pre-Build
Research
The research phase was broken into 3 parts. An initial analysis of our current platform functionality and summary of what we currently offer. Next a comparative competitive analysis was done on each of the other website platform vendors as well as some of the top performing e-commerce websites to understand what practices were common on how advertising between product listings could be used most effectively. Lastly we gathered feedback from our existing customers about what they would like to be able to do with search results advertisements.
Many e-commerce sites like Oakley and Nike use advertisements sprinkled in their listings as well. Apparel companies tended to have the most effectively integrated ads and tended to use lifestyle imagery to highlight the listing.
E-commerce use cases varied from product advertisement to similar product rotation. Amazon and Walmart are highly efficient in converting product sales and offer a good example of how to use inline advertisement.
Automotive industry use of inline ads utilized a mix of full tile images, text and buttons. This featured a wide range of content and services, from revenue-generators like trade & finance, to featured content like dealership events.
Build Phase
Mock-ups and configuration options
After functionality was determined, I began working on the mockups and configuration options. The Sincro/Ansira platform offers a lot of customization for each website, which offers an extra challenge in building something like this. This widget would need to function just like the other widgets available in the platform, use the available style options, and accept the same inputs. Unfortunately the existing functionality would not be able to achieve the desired styles to match what our competitors were offering so new configuration options needed to be developed. These were built along side the mockups to support the desired styles.
Final Product
The Adobe XD interactive mockups were handed off to our engineering team who constructed the new card type and configuration options. The product was announced at NADA 2023 and launched that same week.
Retrospective
Overall this project has been successful, we ran into a few hiccups with the newly developed styles, but our engineering team was brilliant and quickly able to come up with some fixes for those issues. Since it was launched during NADA it has been adopted by hundreds of dealerships on our platform and quickly becoming the more popular tool for advertising on the search results page.