CrystalExpress

CrystalExpress is a native, in APP ad serving platform, dedicates in providing best user experience with HD video ad formats. With our video processing and just-in-time pre-fetch technology, users can now engage with high quality ads without any waiting.

Role - UI/UX Designer at intowow innovation
Regular Employee.
Nov, 2013 - Sep, 2016

The Challenge

Online advertising market over the world has a significant change due to smartphones getting more and more prevalent. Brands has moved a great amount of ad spending from website to mobile. However, there is no proper ad serving platforms could provide a great user experience for broadcasting ads. Inefficient banner ads and an invasive ad experience cause users feel averse about mobile ads. They are unlikely to interact with ads presented. As a result, with a low conversion rate, brands and app publishers could not get any benefits from mobile advertising market.

The Outcome

A brand new ad serving platform that provide high quality video ad formats with a competitive cost for brands. On the other hand, less invasive way of ad presenting, user have a far more better ad experience. They are more likely to interact with ads (at lease not as averse as previous ad formats because there is no full screen ads that you cannot fine a close button.) For app publishers, customizable ad formats allows them to be more flexible to monetize their products with the premise that ads will not ruin their app user experience.

What are problems with conventional mobile ads?

There are two common type of ads that users usually see when they are using an app - banner and full-screen ads. The reason why these two type of ad formats dominating the mobile ad marketing is that most of ad platform suppliers exploited ready-made ad formats from website to mobile. With no user centered design, these web ads diminish the user's willingness to continue using one app .

Who are the stakeholders and what they need

The Business Model Of CrystalExpress

How UX plays a role in improving a mobile ad experience

CE Ad Formats

There were two principles of designing CE ad formats - ad formats should be easy for brands to provide materials and ads should be placed in the least disturbing way to users. With this in mind I designed the mainly three categorized ad formats - Splash ads(Interstitial), native ads and customized ads.

Splash ads
Only pop up after a launch screen

Native ads
This kind of ads might look similar to nearby part (e.g. articles in the streamline)

Customized ads
We were able to design a special ad format to assimilate into an app usage senario. (e.g. image above shown that video ad present in background in CM Locker)

Format Specs

We designed the elaborate format specs such as the dimensions of video and image in order to create a concise user interface. Beside, it helped brands to provide ad materials effortlessly.

Splash Video Ad

Native Video Ad

Microinteractions

Many people have bad experience with ads like click a close button but link to its product page. Our mission was to make users less dislike ads and create a win-win situation for publishers and users, so how users perceive and interact with ads matter. By elaborating a layout of formats, CE brings more intuitive manipulations and less invesive ad experience to users.

Sound indicator flashing 3 seconds from the beginning of video for prompting people tap to it and turn on the audio to engage with video.

Soundwave turns green color once audio on.

Repeat and Call to Action button will present in the end of video.

Adapting in variety aspect ratios

In order to supporting the best ad presenting in the different scales of mobile, CrystalExpress resizes ad material in the same scale whether its video or image.

Design Details

The reason why user are offen irreated by mobile ads is that off-the-shelf platforms are lack of user experience design for displaying ads. We understood how annoying there are so we developed a consistent and a smooth interface which users can easily find how to manipulate.

Implemented in different applications

CE ad formats are flexible adopting different apps, providing way more better experience than conventional ad platforms did to users. While I worked at intowow I cooperated with multinational corporations and well-known medium like Cheetah Mobile and Apple Daily. This was fascinating experience to see my designs being used by publishers who have a million users.

Full-screen ad in the lock screen in CM Security (Android only)

Native ad in Musically

Native ad in Apple Daily

Play to See how CE works in reality

Other Ad Formats

Interactive ad Formats for a growing ecommerce trend

Intowow are driven to use cutting edge technologies and a user-centric strategy to approach challenges in digital advertising industry. Mobile ecommerce, for example, continues to play an increasing role in the success of ecommerce. By 2021, mobile ecommerce sales are expected to account for 54% of total ecommerce sales.

Therefore, ad formats we designed focusing on ecommerce so called "Dynamic Engage Video Ad", it aimed to supply more interactive elements for drawing user's interest and engage with them, then turn out increasing click and conversion rates.

Although this format was not realized virtually due to some technical problems, it was a good try that we used many methods to solve an issue. We thus got a lot of positive comments from our clients and users after they saw demonstration of this ad format.

User would see "plus icons " in a video ad. Those icons were set by ad material operator.

If user is interested in a certain item, they can tap the video(video pauses) then an item label would come up. User can click the label to go to its page. Video would continue when they leave the product page.