Understanding the problem
Facebook advertising offered powerful campaign and optimisation tools, but its complexity created a barrier for people without specialist marketing experience. Filed was developing AI technology to simplify campaign creation. The opportunity was bigger than making the interface easier to use: it was to shape a product experience that could make the technology useful to different kinds of customers, while giving each the right level of guidance and control.
That meant understanding two audiences with very different expectations.
Performance marketers were experienced users who wanted speed, visibility and control. They understood advertising platforms and wanted to see how the AI was making decisions.
Small business owners and marketing generalists needed the opposite. They wanted guidance, reassurance and a simpler route to creating effective campaigns without needing to understand the underlying advertising technology.
This was not simply a difference in experience. The two groups had fundamentally different relationships with complexity. One wanted the platform to take care of it; the other wanted to understand and manage it. A single, fixed interface would inevitably compromise one audience or the other.
A single interface couldn't serve both well. The product needed to adapt to the user rather than forcing every user through the same workflow.
Research, discovery and direction
I brought together customer research, journey mapping and an understanding of the underlying AI technology to establish where the experience needed to change for each audience. The aim was not to reproduce the complexity of Facebook Ads, but to understand which decisions mattered to users and where the product could genuinely help.
Sessions with experienced performance marketers and less experienced advertisers explored their mental models, pain points and confidence levels. The findings showed a much wider gap between the two groups than the original brief had anticipated.
Mapped the campaign creation journey from account setup through to campaign monitoring, identifying points where users lost confidence, made errors or abandoned the process altogether.
Worked closely with the AI engineer to understand what the technology could do and, just as importantly, where automation would feel helpful versus where it might feel like users were losing control.
The strategic insight
The research revealed a clear design principle: beginners needed the AI to simplify the process, while experienced advertisers needed to see what it was doing and retain the ability to intervene. The technology could be shared; the experience around it needed to adapt.
The AI needed to be invisible to beginners and transparent to experts.
One product, two ways of working
I translated that principle into a parallel pathway system: two ways into the same product, built on one campaign structure and AI engine. Instead of designing a compromise between the two audiences, the experience adapted the amount of guidance, information and control to the person using it.
A step-by-step campaign builder designed for users with limited advertising experience. The AI recommended actions at each stage and explained them in plain language. Users could accept, adjust or override suggestions, but the default experience removed unnecessary complexity and focused attention on the decisions that genuinely mattered.
A faster, more direct interface for experienced advertisers. Users could see the full campaign structure, understand what the AI was recommending and override individual decisions where necessary. The AI remained visible rather than hidden.
Both experiences fed into the same campaign structure and optimisation engine. Users could move between the two levels without losing data, allowing the product to support people as their confidence and expertise developed over time.
Two different experiences. One underlying product.
