Media Audience Builder Tool
- jonwalmsley
- Apr 2
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 7
Overview
This Audience Explorer tool was developed for Omnicom Media Group (OMG) to address the challenge of building targeted audiences amidst increasing data privacy restrictions.
As the lead UX Designer, I played a key role in designing a privacy-first, non-ID based audience building tool using postcode-level data. I led the design process, collaborated with external development teams and stakeholders, scoping, designing, defining the tool as well as conducting user research and usability testing.
Goal
With the increasing ethical and legal limitations on using cookies and device IDs for targeted advertising, there was a clear need for alternative audience identification methods. The goal was to develop an intuitive tool that leveraged postcode data, combined with multiple audience datasets, to enable propensity-based targeting rather than direct identification. This tool aimed to provide a user-friendly way to conduct this audience identification process.
Role | Tools | Team | Timeline |
Lead UX Designer | Figma, Sketch, Axure RP | UX, Product Manager, Product Marketer, Data Partners, Lead Developer | 2023 Initial Release, Multiple releases since |
Process
We identified an opportunity to lead in the market as data privacy regulations evolved. As the sole UX designer, My goal was to create something that would actually work for the people using it. I conducted extensive user workshops, carefully analyzing existing audience building methods to understand the core challenges users faced.
Throughout the design process, we collaborated closely with the ethics team to ensure our approach aligned with privacy guidelines.
This was about anticipating the changing needs of our clients and the market.
The design phase presented some interesting challenges, particularly with the expression builder. I remember evaluating the initial 'Simple' and 'Advanced' views we had designed and built and recognizing that what I had designed for flexibility and simplicity was actually causing user confusion.
Lets cover this particular situation in a bit more detail to explore how this feature of the application evolved.
Expression Builder
The expression builder is essentially a user interface for constructing complex boolean queries against a set of audience attributes. It allows users to define custom segments using a combination of AND, OR, and NOT operators, along with grouping parentheses to manage operator priorities. This enables the creation of highly specific audience definitions by intersecting and excluding various demographic, interest, and behavioral criteria, ultimately returning a targeted subset of the overall user base.
Initially this was built following discussions with users as we were able to split the userbase into those wanting more advanced query-building functionality vs those new to the system and therefore needing to keep things clear, straightforward and guided.
Usability testing was a crucial part of the process. What people think they may initially want does not always match what they actually need once it is delivered.
I conducted numerous sessions to validate design decisions and understand how users interacted with the tool. I paid close attention to their feedback as well as reviewing usage analytics, refining the interface based on these insights. The workshops with key users, who had early access to new features, were particularly valuable. Their input helped us shape the tool before its wider release.
User feedback also suggested that, while being able to pick variables / statements from a set of dropdowns was useful, what would really benefit them was being able to search through all in one place.
This project was about delivering a solution that was both effective and user-centered.
Following user feedback, usability testing of the initial release and analytics reviews I scoped out an alternative design for this expression builder, integrating the ‘Search’ as well as combining both the Simple and Advanced views into a single panel.
Dot Voting
We ran further workshops with users over Teams using FigJam to discuss these and other potential new features for this tool - while it would be good to build everything we wanted to, time, budgets and resources always pull in different directions so we had to prioritise.
The proposals for improving this expression builder received significant votes during these sessions, so we knew we were barking up the right tree this time.
Enhanced Design
The expression builder design was agreed on and went through development. I worked closely with the lead developer on this custom component and we went back-and-forth iteratively testing and suggesting improvements to it (such as how the internal expanders should work) until we settled on a working feature the team was happy with.
This feature now allows users to build expressions in whatever way they choose. They can pick items from the dropdown, they can search for statements matching their needs, and now - if they’re feeling confident enough - can even manually edit the expression themselves, manually inserting parenthesis, operators or variables.
This gave users the flexibility to find audiences for their media campaigns at a level as broad or targetted as they need.
This has now been successfully rolled out to users across the group and the team are hard at work scoping out new features to ensure this product keeps on growing.
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