Case study 3: Preview experience information architecture
Overview
The ad preview experience is the last thing an advertiser sees before they publish a campaign and the moment they verify that their ad looks right across every placement it might appear in. It accounts for more than 40% of time spent in ad creation, and when the experience became too outdated to surface what creative automation was actually doing to ads, a full redesign was necessary. The core challenge: preserve what advertisers depended on while building something that could keep pace with a rapidly expanding automation surface.
The challenge
Our creative automation default-on strategy meant advertisers were increasingly publishing ads that had been modified by automation features they couldn't fully vet in preview. An outdated preview experience left a transparency gap right before publish.
Two problems compounded each other. First, advertisers lacked visibility into how creative automation features were changing their ads across different placements. Second, as the number of placements and automation features grew, the existing filtering and navigation options weren't sufficient to let advertisers get the full picture. The preview experience needed to scale — in information architecture, in content patterns, and in the ability to communicate personalization without overwhelming users.
My role
I led content design and information architecture on the preview redesign end-to-end, working directly with product design in Figma and collaborating with engineering to solve structural problems that were as much about information architecture as they were about copy. I managed and incorporated director and stakeholder feedback throughout and aligned a broad coalition of working groups ahead of ship.
What I did
Led the information architecture for the new experience
The redesign wasn't just a visual refresh — it required rethinking how information was organized across the preview surface. I led the IA development, structuring how placements, creative variations, and automation features would be navigated and understood together. This meant making decisions about hierarchy, labeling, and filtering logic that would hold up as both the feature set and placement landscape continued to expand.Established pill and hover state patterns for transparency
One of the central content challenges was communicating, at a glance, which automation features had affected a given preview — and what those effects were. I established the design patterns for pill usage and hover states that gave advertisers scannable, layered access to that information: a quick signal at the surface level, with full detail available on demand. These patterns were aligned with content design org standards and have since been adopted by many partner teams to address transparency issues across Ads Manager.Wrote clearer header content and personalization framing
The advanced preview header needed to do real work — setting expectations about what advertisers were seeing without overwhelming them. I rewrote the header content to clearly communicate that the preview reflected both placement-level variations and Advantage+ Creative adaptations, and introduced language that framed personalization as intentional and performance-driven rather than opaque. The "Ways your ad will be seen" framing, with its explanation of variation logic, came directly from this work.Established a sorting paradigm with engineering
Preview order needed to reflect which variations were most important for an advertiser to review. I collaborated with engineering to develop a principled ranking methodology for feature previews, organized around risk and visual distinctiveness. This gave the experience a predictable logic that advertisers could internalize rather than a list that felt arbitrary.Drove aspect ratio terminology consistency
As part of the redesign, I established terminology standards for aspect ratio details that have since carried over across Ads Manager, which is an example of how my content decisions have had org-wide reach when done with enough rigor.Impact landed
- User satisfaction scores increased dramatically; all advertisers surveyed preferred the new experience over the previous one
- Preview-aware adoption of higher-risk features increased following launch
- Pill and hover state standards adopted by multiple partner teams as a shared solution to transparency problems across the broader Ads Manager surface
- Aspect ratio terminology established in this work became the cross-Ads Manager standard
Hover state patterns and pill-based content approach was a new addition to the preview surface. The approach of displaying the sub-feature (”Vary aspect ratio”) and then explaining the overall feature that is opted in (”Visual touch-ups”) improved CSAT responses and is still in use.