Dolphin

Dolphin operates a network of advertising screens and billboards across multiple locations. Their existing portal required businesses to go through the client to create and publish ads, creating a bottleneck for both sides. The goal was to introduce a self-serve model: local businesses log in, build their own ad using pre-designed templates, and publish directly to the screens without needing a mediator.

The challenge was making that process feel accessible. Most of their users were local business owners, not marketers or designers. The portal had to guide them from zero to a published ad with minimal friction and maximum confidence in the outcome.

Cenciss was engaged as UI/UX designer to own the full design of the ad creation workflow.

The workflow design was the central problem. Ad creation involves a sequence of decisions: business category, template selection, content customization, orientation preview, and screen targeting. Each step had to feel like a natural progression rather than a form to get through. Any point of confusion would cause users to abandon the process before publishing.

Template selection needed to balance breadth and clarity. Users needed enough template variety to find something relevant to their business type, but presenting too many options at once risked overwhelming them. The browsing and filtering experience had to surface the right templates without requiring users to scroll through dozens of irrelevant ones.

Customization had to be powerful without being complex. Users needed to swap images, edit text, and adjust layouts through a drag-and-drop interface that felt intuitive to someone who had never used a design tool. Professional design software conventions would not work here.

Multi-orientation preview was a usability requirement, not a nice-to-have. The client's screens ranged from portrait billboards to landscape displays. A business owner needed to see exactly how their ad would render on each format before committing to publish.

The design process started with mapping the full user journey before touching any visuals. Every step from landing on the portal to confirming a published ad was mapped and reviewed against the client's requirements, identifying where friction was most likely to occur.

Wireframes established the structural layout and step-by-step progression of the workflow. The design used a guided, linear flow with clear progress indicators so users always knew where they were in the process and what came next.

Template selection was designed with category filtering upfront, letting users narrow by business type before browsing. High-fidelity mockups in Figma showed how templates would be displayed and previewed before selection.

The customization interface was designed around a drag-and-drop canvas with constrained interaction zones, making it easy to replace placeholder content without accidentally breaking the template layout. Text editing, image uploads, and layout adjustments were all accessible from a single panel.

The multi-orientation preview was built into the final review step, showing the ad rendered in each relevant screen format side by side. Interactive prototypes in Adobe XD were used to validate the full workflow with the client before final delivery.