Orders & Operations

Digital Advertising CRM

Redesigned the dashboard that sales, traffic, and finance teams at NBC, FOX, and Sinclair use every day to manage millions in TV ad inventory. Led the IA, visual system, and accessibility work end-to-end on a team of three. Shipped to production in 2022 — drove a 28% lift in feature adoption and contributed to 100% renewal across the broadcaster accounts I supported.

Client

Sales, traffic, and finance teams at Tier-1 broadcasters (NBC, FOX, Sinclair)

Year

2021-2022

Business domain

Digital advertising, CRM

Role

UX Designer — end-to-end ownership

team

Me (UX lead) + 1 Jr UX designer, 1 PM, 1 frontend lead

WEB

DESIGN SYSTEM

B2B

Orders & Operations

Digital Advertising CRM

Client

Sales, traffic, and finance teams at Tier-1 broadcasters (NBC, FOX, Sinclair)

Year

2021-2022

Business domain

Digital advertising, CRM

Role

UX Designer — end-to-end ownership

team

Me (UX lead) + 1 Jr UX designer, 1 PM, 1 frontend lead

WEB

DESIGN SYSTEM

B2B

Orders & Operations

Digital Advertising CRM

Client

Sales, traffic, and finance teams at Tier-1 broadcasters (NBC, FOX, Sinclair)

Year

2021-2022

Business domain

Digital advertising, CRM

Role

UX Designer — end-to-end ownership

team

Me (UX lead) + 1 Jr UX designer, 1 PM, 1 frontend lead

WEB

DESIGN SYSTEM

B2B

Orders & Operations

Digital Advertising CRM

Client

Sales, traffic, and finance teams at Tier-1 broadcasters (NBC, FOX, Sinclair)

Year

2021-2022

Business domain

Digital advertising, CRM

Role

UX Designer — end-to-end ownership

team

Me (UX lead) + 1 Jr UX designer, 1 PM, 1 frontend lead

WEB

DESIGN SYSTEM

B2B

A QUICK CONTEXT

Modernizing the dashboard behind every TV ad you see

This is a corner of software most people never see:

When a brand like Pepsi buys a 30-second spot during NFL primetime, that deal doesn't go straight to air. It first has to be entered, scheduled, approved, and billed inside a back-office system that broadcasters use every single day.

That system is called AOS (Advertising Operations System), and Orders & Operations is the screen where the actual work happens — where sales reps, traffic teams, and finance teams at NBC, FOX, and Sinclair spend most of their working hours.

By late 2021, AOS was over five years old. The interface looked like it. New hires struggled to learn it. But the people who'd been using it for years had built up real muscle memory in there. So the brief wasn't really "redesign this." It was something a lot harder:

How do you modernize a tool without making the people who depend on it every day relearn their job?

That's the project this case study is about.

STRAIGHT TO THE POINT

The three decisions this project hinged on

I'm going to skip the "I did research, then ideation, then wireframes" walkthrough. Of course they exist, and every UX case study has it, but it isn't what made this project work. Here are the three calls I made that the project actually turned on.

01

A journey map for a job I'd never done

User Goal

User Action

Opportunity

Here's the part of B2B design that nobody really talks about: I am not a TV ad sales rep. I can't just install the app and feel the friction the way a B2C designer can. I had no way to actually live the workflow.

Pretending otherwise would have produced the kind of journey map that looks great in a portfolio and is useless for shipping software. So I did the opposite — I sat down with stakeholders (sales reps, traffic ops, the PM) and reverse-engineered the workflow with them. Eight steps from "open the dashboard" to "send the order to publisher," running in parallel with what users were actually trying to accomplish at each step and where the system was getting in their way.

That map became the spine of the entire project. Every later design call traced back to a specific step in it: this card layout solves friction at step 3; this notification panel solves the recovery problem we found at step 7. When stakeholders asked "why this and not that?" I had a one-page answer.

Guiding question

"What component is good-to-have in the current O&O screens, and what should be kicked out?"

Results

Prioritize all the information in the table
Simplify visual cue
Make better use of screen space

Guiding question

What component is good-to-have in the current O&O screens, and what should be kicked out?

Results

Prioritize all the information in the table

Simplify visual cue

Take sufficient usage of screen space

When you can't be the user, partner with someone who is, and put their words in the artifact. Don't paraphrase the workflow into your own UX vocabulary — that's exactly the move that strips out the operational detail that matters.

02

Buckets, not rows

Testing Version for Orders and Operations

The old dashboard packed every order into a dense, Excel-style list. Efficient if you already knew where things were — a wall of noise if you didn't. New users got lost. Existing users had built coping mechanisms that made the list feel fine, but only because they'd stopped noticing how much friction they were navigating around.

I pitched moving from rows to buckets: each order in its own contained block, key info up top, supporting details clearly subordinated underneath. The pushback was reasonable — "rows are denser, our users won't want to lose information." That's a fair concern when your users have managed inventory in spreadsheets for fifteen years.

So I built both versions in Axure and tested them. 45 minutes of task work, 20 minutes of debrief, with PMs and real users. The card layout won on the three measures the team cared about: time to locate a specific order, error rate when editing, and self-reported confidence. That's the version that shipped.

With experienced B2B users, density isn't the same as efficiency. A clearer hierarchy can beat a denser screen even for power users — but you have to prove it with their workflow, because their first instinct will be to defend what they're used to.

03

Accessibility as a gate, not a footnote

When I joined, accessibility was on the "we should do this someday" list. For an enterprise tool used eight hours a day by sales teams of all ages and visual abilities, that wasn't good enough.

I made the case to leadership directly: contrast ratios, hit-target sizes, focus states, screen reader behavior. Ran every key screen through WAVE, documented every issue, and folded the fixes into the design system itself rather than patching them screen by screen. Leadership backed it. Engineering took it on.

By the time the redesign launched, accessibility had moved from a thing people felt vaguely guilty about to a standard the team checked against by default. That cultural shift was, honestly, harder to win than the visual redesign was.

DELIVERY

The system in context

A selection of screens demonstrating the visual and interaction language the system was built to support.

Order list — primary entry point, with filtering and grouping built into the header

Workspace view — where the actual editing happens, organized in cards

Workstream list — detailed line-item review for traffic and finance

UI specification handoff — Zeplin spec for engineering

IMPACT

What changed after launch

Renewal across accounts I supported

Lift in feature adoption

Tier-1 broadcasters (NBC, FOX, Sinclair) using it daily

Orders and Operation module Shipped to production in 2022. The patterns I introduced became the foundation for the broader AOS design system update

THINK ONE MORE STEP

What I'd do differently

Two things, with the benefit of a few years' distance:

I'd push for live telemetry from day one.

The 28% adoption lift is real — but I had to wait months after launch to see the numbers. If I'd worked with engineering to instrument the key workflows during build, I could have iterated within the first month instead of the first quarter.

I'd document what we deliberately didn't change.

Half the success of this redesign was the discipline of leaving certain interactions alone — the muscle-memory parts the veterans relied on. We never wrote those decisions down. Future maintainers have no way to know what was sacred and what was just legacy.

ONE LAST QUESTION

Why this case study, in 2026?

I'm including this older project because Operative is where I learned how I actually think about senior UX work: small teams, ambiguous B2B workflows, real users with real muscle memory, real money on the line, and the discipline of making a redesign feel — to the people using it every day — like it isn't one.

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