Bing Ads
I work as a UX designer on the Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) UX Team under the AI & Research organization at Microsoft. My core role is to manage, facilitate, and produce UI for accounts & billing within the product. Problems in this space range from onboarding to payment methods and usually require rapid prototyping and quick turnaround times to ship features that could potentially save our advertisers time and money.
Team
8 designers
3 researchers
6 content writers
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Role
Designer
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Year
2019
Design question
"How might we continue to grow Bing Ads' search advertising market share while continuing to provide our users with smart, efficient, and fluid experiences within the product?"
Research
The Bing Ads UX team allows for flexibility and collaboration where designers and researchers are constantly deep diving into the problem together. There is room for designers to conduct their own usability studies and even speak directly with our users worldwide. This means that the designers truly understand the problem and the user's pain points so that we can provide solutions and gain more trust with our customers.
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One of the exciting things about working in search marketing is attending the SMX conference each year. Our team held a booth at the SMX East 3-day conference in New York City where we conducted usability studies with attendees. Each study was moderated by a designer or researcher and walked the participants through an interactive exercise involving a new feature we were working on. Each interview lasted approximately 45 minutes and was incentivized with Bing Ads coupons.
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In my time at Microsoft, I have worked with our researchers to build interactive prototypes for over 15+ usability studies; gaining both qualitative and quantitative feedback on accounts & billing needs from both our internal account managers and our customers worldwide.
Ideate / prototype
My core role as a designer at Microsoft has me right in the sweet spot of design, working with rapid prototyping tools such as Axure Pro and Adobe Creative Suite to build fully functional prototypes for our program managers to use in their specs and our researchers to validate during usability studies. I work very closely with our PMs to sit down and identify the problem our users are having, find points in which we may need more research in, and identify solutions we can begin building right away.
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Bing Ads' login page was one of the more neglected parts of the product since its merge with Yahoo Search and AOL (as shown on the left). It was important to tackle this onboarding process in full as our users rely on the login page to provide them with more content than just two text fields. In this project, I worked closely with Marketing, whom owned the content, program managers, researchers and our China development team to build a new content-rich login page.
Evaluate / results
I have been at Microsoft now for 3 years and have shipped over 10+ features to our advertisers worldwide. We have instrumentation in place to gauge success and failure rates of these features, and will continue to iterate on them as our users inquire more. The new login page design has shown an increase in sign ups for Bing Ads and SEO traffic and our users are already enjoying a new performance based coupon system!
In addition to my core role, I am very passionate about diversity and social justice. This is why I joined the AI & R Diversity & Inclusion team to focus on attracting, retaining, and engaging diverse talent within Microsoft. We aim to decrease the interview bias, gender bias, and racial bias that often occur within large companies, even Microsoft. I have dedicated my time to visit under-represented Universities, such as my alma mater Hampton University, to help University Recruiting hire young promising interns and full time employees for Microsoft. I enjoy being able to mix my passion for social justice with my passion for design and I look forward to how I can continue to explore this dynamic in my career.