Redesigning Campaign Editing to Win Back 3.9M Small Businesses
Role
Tools/Skills
Team
Duration
Overview
Making campaign editing simpler for small medium business owners in TikTok Ads Manager
TikTok Ads Manager is where advertisers create, publish, and edit their ads. It is a complex system where everything lives together.
Problem
3.9M small businesses stop after their first campaign. Editing was where they got lost.
A small business can launch its first TikTok campaign in a few guided steps. Then it lands in a campaign list and a long-form editing drawer full of jargon, with weak hierarchy and drawers nested inside drawers. A newbie has to learn the whole ads system just to change a budget.
Design Goal: Make campaign editing as simple as possible.
Design Process
How I got up to speed
I joined with no knowledge of the ads system. I met regularly with the PM and my mentor to learn how it worked, mapped the creation flow against the editing flow to find where it breaks, and sat in on product reviews to see how the team sets up experiments and which metrics it tracks.
Final Solution
Guided editing with actionable steps
Clicking Edit on a campaign opens a drawer with the same steps as creation: objective, campaign info, ad content, then targeting and budget.
Before
After
Consideration
Why Drawer over Modal? Modals suit fast, single-field changes, but adjusting ad settings is slower work, so users need room to review each step.
Complex platform constraints
I used AI to move fast with constraints
Besides the editing design, I went beyond scope and proposed a simplified list where SMB owners can view campaign information. However, the current list carries deep code dependencies, and the engineering cost was too high, so this idea is set for the next milestone and the scope was narrowed down to the editing drawer, which is the part that shipped.
Generated in Claude
Impact
The design is in implementation and ready for handoff.
~72K
New advertisers
+1,500
New net cash active users
Improved
CSAT score
Reflection
What I took away
Scope is a design decision.
When the simplified campaign list was ruled out on engineering cost, I narrowed my focus to the editing drawer. That change reached users sooner than holding out for the full redesign, and it taught me to judge a design by what can ship and move the business, not by how complete it looks in Figma.
Question the problem before the solution.
I joined with a PRD and no knowledge of the system. Learning why each constraint existed let me defend my decisions in design review and find a compromise that kept the core simplification intact.