Adomatic.io
Phoenix from the ashes: Re-crafting a legacy system to give rise to a new one
What led us to build this product?
In an effort to increase revenue through our legacy platform (Oomph) and to diversify from the shifty publishing market, we began selling the process of manually converting thousands of print ads to interactive, animating digital content for mobile devices. By many measures it was a success, we gained new revenue sources as well as a whole stack of knowledge about how to transform content for digital platforms without going through an approval process.
A problem remained however, we were doing the ad conversion manually. This is what led is to build Adomatic.io and once we proved that it could be done automatically for our own business, we wanted to offer it to everyone else in the layout and adtech markets.
The Process
Because we spent so much energy in documenting the design decisions of the conversion process, it was only natural for us to want to transform those decisions into an automated process allowing it to scale, serving many more people than we could ever do with a team of designers.
The Death
At this point it had been close to two years happily converting digital ads — however—despite the growing estimates on demand for digital ads coming out of the big print publishers, their actual volumes began to plateau. As it turns out, their digital teams had one idea about growth but their sales teams had another. What we eventually discovered is that there was an inherent lack of incentive to sell digital ad space. Although they were selling less and less print ads and more and more digital ads, they could still charge far, far more for print.
The Rebirth
This then forced us to push Adomatic as a mostly consumer facing SaaS product. The question for us as a business then became: How can we transform what we’ve learnt from our legacy platform and our more recent advertising investment into a successful product?
As the person championing user-centred design, I needed to also ask: Who are the users and how can this product become something that solves their problems?
The following months would then become a journey into refining the technology into a fully automated service as well as collecting feedback on iterations as early as possible to help steer the product in the right direction.
Adomatic Screen Record — How it works
Branding
Wireframe Iterations for the tool page
Facebook Campaign Artwork
Email Campaign Animations
Photoshop Templates
Update: Somewhat to our surprise, Adomatic.io has now been incorporated as a feature in another platform and is now offline. For more details on the process involved in its creation, simply get in contact with me.
Topics left out…
- How early prototypes were developed and what was learned from them
- Designing an animation engine using computer vision and OCR metadata
- Transferring human designer problem solving skills into computer algorithms
- Building an editor and not letting it negate the concept of automation
- Using UserTesing, Peek and Live Chat to collect qualitative data on a shoestring budget
- Using Mixpanel and Lucky Orange to collect quantitative data
- Building concierge MVPs to test different verticals and justify product development
