Digital ad platform: Reaching a 91% CSAT score with a high-performance, streamlined interface
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Project overview
Reaching 2.5 billion gamers while they play — that’s an advertising opportunity like no other. But to turn it into a profit-generating investment, brands need the right tools to target their campaigns, all while minimizing customer acquisition and engagement costs.
Our client conceived HotPlay as a digital ad platform that would give brands these tools. It would connect them with game publishers and studios, allowing them to run ads seamlessly within gaming apps. The platform’s precise targeting and personalization would help brands maximize marketing campaign ROI.
But to turn this vision into a full-fledged product, our client needed a reliable partner to design and develop a responsive, intuitive platform optimized for performance and user needs.
Services
Challenges
While our client had a clear vision of the platform’s key features, specific user flows remained vague and required extensive research. Conducting comprehensive user research was our main challenge during the project. This research would guide us in designing and refining the interface until it became truly intuitive.
Performance was also crucial for our client. As the platform had to be integrated with gaming solutions to display in-app ads, ensuring consistently high performance while connecting brands with 2.5 billion gamers was yet another challenge.
Finally, we had to ensure users could create and manage marketing campaigns on the go without a decline in the quality of user experience. To that end, we conducted thorough user research and testing for the platform’s mobile interface in addition to its desktop version.
Our discovery phase revealed the following business needs and technical requirements that guided our work on the project:
Strategic business needs
01 Launch a digital ad management platform to help brands increase engagement while reducing customer acquisition and retention costs
02 Help brands maximize marketing campaign ROI with precise targeting and personalization
03 Reach an ROI of at least 15% after the platform’s launch
04 Achieve customer retention of at least 80% within the first year
05 Reach customer satisfaction score of at least 85%
06 Secure a customer engagement score of at least 75
Technical requirements
01 Design a responsive interface based on comprehensive user research
02 Include two roles in the system (user and admin) with distinct permissions and access to features
03 Ensure the platform can support four types of ad campaigns: click-through, coupon, interactive, impression
04 Secure user and billing information
05 Ensure the system’s consistently high performance under different workloads
06 Limit response time to <0.3 s and latency to <50 ms
07 Achieve the system usability scale (SUS) score of at least 75
Our human-centered design expertise combined with performance-optimized development can help you secure the desired engagement rate.
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Solutions
Thanks to our hands-on, no-stone-left-unturned approach to user research, we identified and refined the user flows, creating 40+ views in the process. As a result, the platform’s interface secured a system usability scale (SUS) score of 82 and drove the customer engagement index to 83.
To turn our interface prototype into a fully functional solution, we used ReactJS for its responsive and high-performance frontend capabilities, combined with HTML and CSS. The solution’s architecture was optimized for performance, with the backend built with Node.js and integrations powered by REST APIs.
Signup and account management
The user journey starts with the signup page. When designing the user flow, we ensured the registration form was simple and fast to fill out. We also verified that all entered data met format requirements with comprehensive validation rules.
Our UX optimization efforts allowed us to reduce the user error rate for this flow by 43% compared to the first design iteration. This led to a task success rate of 94% for signups.
Role-based access features
In line with our client’s requirements, we designed and implemented the platform functionality for two categories: users and admins. Users have access to billing and campaign creation and management features. Admins, in turn, can review all campaigns to decide whether to approve them.
These role-based features were refined during our user research and testing for maximum task success rate and usability. These efforts helped us secure a SUS score of 82 for the whole platform.
Secure billing
Before users can create their first campaign, they must add their billing details to the account. We streamlined this process using a form with stringent validation rules. During development, we also ensured the financial data remained safe by encrypting it at rest and in transit.
Thanks to the implemented validation rules, error rates during billing information input were limited to 8% during our testing. Our attention to billing data security, combined with strong user authentication, also minimized the risk of security incidents and helped foster trust among customers.
Campaign creation and management
We implemented four types of campaigns, each with a distinct form adapted to the specific type: click-through, coupon, interactive, and impression. Regardless of the selected type, however, users can easily select the desired budget and target audience. Targeting features include parameters like demographics, location, interests, game genres, and used devices.
On top of that, we refined user flows to enable users to easily review and manage their campaigns. Editing them is also made easy so that users can refine their targeting based on campaign results.
Campaign creation and management, the platform's core features, were the main drivers behind the solution’s ROI and customer satisfaction score, as they were intuitive and convenient.
Campaign analytics
To help users make well-weighed decisions on campaign management, we designed and implemented robust campaign analytics features. As a result, the platform visualizes all crucial metrics like clicks, unique users, cost per 1,000 impressions, and total spending in easy-to-grasp charts and graphs updated in real time.
Thanks to our focus on visual communication, users can easily view and understand all campaign data in a single dashboard. Our efforts in implementing real-time data streaming and optimizing the solution’s performance ensured users always have access to timely insights based on the latest data.
Responsive interface
In addition to the intuitive, fast desktop interface, we also created a smooth and frictionless mobile UI/UX design, refining it based on our multi-faceted testing results.
Thanks to our use of ReactJS, the platform shows top performance and boasts a native-like look and feel on mobile screens of all sizes. The mobile interface’s SUS score also matched that of its desktop counterpart.
Our focus on performance optimizations, in turn, ensured the response time and latency on mobile devices were as low as on desktop.
Tech stack
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Impact
Thanks to our focus on usability and performance, HotPlay could successfully help brands reduce customer acquisition and engagement costs while increasing campaign ROI. Our client, in turn, saw the following benefits from our involvement in the project:
Our turn-key design and development services will help you reach customer retention and ROI goals with user-centric flows and consistently high performance.
Contact usTestimonials
The responsiveness, attention to detail and high-level communication from Darly Solutions was outstanding. Communication with the team was all online and was absolutely seamless. They were highly responsive, worked to tight deadlines and provided great feedback and communication throughout the entire project to ensure it remained on schedule and all quality requirements were being met. They exceeded all of our expectations, from design through to delivery.
LLC Darly Solutions's team performs well since the collaboration started. They are fluent in specific programming languages, they are also fluent in English, and they have a great response time. What is most unique and impressive about Darly Solutions is that everyone in the team is inherently communicative and understands the expertise of their respective fields. The team is very agile and can predict stress situations in which we work together to fix and maintain.
Darly Solutions' work so far inspires confidence, as they're skilled and trustworthy. The health platform is incredibly happy with their work. The team at Darly is communicative, responsive, and responsible. I’d recommend them to people looking to do more than build a simple little software.
By collaborating with Darly Solutions, there is a significant improvement in the project's quality of codes compared to their original codebase. They lead efficient project management and keep the client updated with their reports. They're a flexible team that delivers promising results. They don't just do as they're told, they actively participate in the design process, which is going to yield us a much better platform in the end.
Darly Solutions was able to develop the site with all functions running. The team was responsive throughout the engagement. They excelled at scheduling and delivered projects on the specified timeline. The whole team was a pleasure to work with. I am very glad that I entrusted them with my project, this is the best company for me!
The quality of their work is very high, and we get very good customer feedback on what our site looks like. They're very reliable and have a great overview of the technologies they're using. They meet our deadlines and are very accurate with their time estimations on a project. In addition, they're responsive and great with communication with a great command of English — it's very easy to talk to them. Moreover, we've integrated them into our development and scrum process, where we have daily stand-ups with their project manager and developers through Slack.
LLC Darly Solutions are highly skilled at UI/UX and follow very good engineering standards, and have been very professional in its approach to all the work to date (including the initial consultancy, which was the deciding factor). They have taken ownership of the work in way that demonstrates how much they value the work they are doing and consequently the work we are doing. I am gaining confidence that the decisions they make are good decisions and that this will result in a product that will exceed our initial expectations.
Darly Solutions developed the app in a quick manner, and the code quality was excellent. The professional team was committed to building a successful product. The code quality was good, and the app has been built in a little more than 1 month, which is a result I'm very happy with. They were laid back but professional at the same time.
Darly Solutions’ work helped my business tremendously. They were able to identify key areas for growth and improvement. The team was communicative and professional throughout the entire engagement. LLC Darly Solutions is a solutions-oriented vendor that drives results. They’re really professional and they know what they’re doing. The team knows how to identify my problems and solve them.
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