Creative, without the busywork
Role:
Lead Product designer
Year:
/ 2023 - 2025
Team Size:
8
Redesigning FreeWheel's Creative experience to help Ad Operations teams find, review, and manage advertising creatives faster.
Freewheel TV Platform
Creative management had become fragmented across the platform. Users were spending time searching, reviewing, and updating their creatives through workflows that weren't designed for the volume and complexity of their work.
I led the redesign of the Creative experience, balancing customer needs, technical constraints, and platform standards to create a more centralized workflow for managing creatives.
The context
FreeWheel's TV Platform helps media companies manage and monetize advertising inventory across linear TV, digital video, and streaming.
The Creative Module sits inside the ecosystem, where Ad Operations teams manage the actual advertising assets moving through those workflows.
When creative management becomes difficult, the impact isn't isolated to one screen- it creates friction in the operational workflows that keep advertising moving.
The problem wasn't one broken screen. It was a fragmented workflow.
The Problem
Creative management had evolved across different parts of the platform. Programmatic and Direct Sold creatives lived in different experiences, workflows weren't consistently aligned with the Circle Design System, and common tasks often required repetitive work.
For Ad Operations teams managing large volumes of creatives, these weren't just UI inconveniences. They meant more searching, more navigation, and more manual work.
Four signals emerged
Finding the right creative was difficult
Search and filtering didn't reflect how users actually needed to locate creatives.
Reviewing video was unnecessarily cumbersome
Users needed to repeatedly check disclaimers and other details, but the player didn't support the controls they expected.
Repetitive edits created operational overhead
Updating metadata across multiple creatives meant doing the same work repeatedly.
Creative management was fragmented
Users were navigating between experiences that represented related parts of the same workflow.
Objectives:
What were we trying to achieve?
01
Modernize
Bring the Creative experience into Circle V2.
02
Find faster
Improve search and filtering.
03
Centralize
Create a more coherent home for creative management.
04
Work at scale
Introduce bulk editing and better metadata visibility.
Then the project stopped…
Put it on pause
The redesign originally began in May 2023. Early research and data analysis surfaced opportunities to improve the experience, and client interviews were being organized to better understand the problems.
Then priorities shifted, and the project was paused.
Nine months later, I inherited the redesign
When the project restarted in February 2024, I took the lead on bringing the work back into focus.
Rather than starting over, I pulled together the research, feedback, existing workflows, and open questions to understand where the strongest opportunities were.
What I was looking for:
Where were users consistently struggling?
Which problems were worth solving?
What could realistically be changed?
Where could we create the most impact without disrupting workflows that already worked?
I didn't redesign everything. I focused where the opportunity was strongest.
Programmatic Creatives
KEEP IN EXISTING LOCATION
Preserve a workflow that was working.
Direct Sold Creatives
MOVE INTO CREATIVE MODULE
Centralize and streamline the experience.
The goal wasn't to consolidate everything for the sake of consolidation. It was to improve the workflows where centralization could meaningfully reduce friction.
The architecture came next
With the scope defined, I worked with Product and Engineering to establish the information architecture and determine how the different creative workflows should fit together.
The goal was to create a structure that could support the new experience without losing the workflows users already understood.
The constraints shaped the solution
Before moving into detailed UI, I worked through the problem with Engineering to understand the technical constraints and identify which improvements were realistic within the existing platform.
Those conversations helped narrow the solution space and keep the focus on the highest-impact problems.
Before designing the interface, I explored the workflow
I started by sketching different ways the experience could be structured, focusing first on the workflow rather than visual polish.
The exploration helped me work through hierarchy, navigation, editing patterns, and how the different creative types could coexist within the experience.
I tested multiple directions before committing to the system
Once the workflow began to take shape, I explored higher-fidelity directions in Figma to evaluate hierarchy, navigation, and interaction patterns.
This allowed me to compare approaches before committing to the final experience.
A more centralized Creative experience
The final experience brought the most important creative management workflows into a more consistent system, while giving Ad Operations teams faster ways to find, review, and update their creatives.
The redesign also brought the experience into Circle V2.
Search that reflects how users find their creatives
Users needed more ways to narrow down the creatives they were looking for, including attributes such as industry, brand, and sensitive domains.
Bulk editing for high-volume work
For Ad Operations teams managing large volumes of creatives, repetitive one-by-one editing created unnecessary friction.
Bulk editing allowed users to make changes across multiple creatives at once.
A more useful review experience
Reviewing creatives often meant repeatedly checking video content and important disclaimers.
The redesigned experience improved the visibility of important information and introduced a more useful review experience.
The first version wasn't the final version
I used usability sessions and client conversations to pressure-test the redesigned workflows. The feedback reinforced the value of bulk editing, improved search, and clearer alerts, while also surfacing opportunities to refine the alert experience.
The response after launch
“Thank you for the new UI. The enhancements, the enlarged font, the visibility of the industries, the ability to edit while reviewing, all great upgrades.”
“They really like the new UI. They're glad they can see the industry. They want this UI to be available for other areas of the platform.”
OUTCOMES
01
Editing took half the clicks
We compared the legacy editing experience with the redesigned details page. Consolidating individual fields into one continuous form reduced the amount of repeated navigation required to make edits.
LEGACY
NEW
02
Time spent in the details page dropped
Average time spent in the details page decreased from nearly an hour to 23 minutes. The redesigned page reduced the amount of navigation needed to review and edit creative information.
LEGACY
~60 min
~37 minutes less
NEW
23 min
03
Users stopped reverting to the legacy experience
We launched with a safety net: users could return to the legacy experience at any time. Fallback use started around 600 clicks per week, then dropped to fewer than 100 after roughly two weeks as users became comfortable with the redesigned workflow.
LEGACY UI FALLBACK CLICKS / WEEK
Launch
After ~2 weeks
Users initially relied on the familiar legacy workflow, then increasingly stayed in the redesigned experience as they gained confidence.
Designing te system, not just the screen
This project reinforced that the most valuable part of a redesign isn't deciding what the interface should look like.
It's deciding what is worth changing in the first place.
Three things shaped the work:
Know what not to redesign
Programmatic Creatives were already working well, so I avoided creating unnecessary disruption.
Bring Engineering into the problem early
Understanding technical constraints helped shape a solution that was both ambitious and realistic.
Measure success by changed behavior
The redesign wasn't successful because it looked newer. It was successful because users could find, review, and manage creatives with less friction.
Thanks for reading
