Designing a Self-Service TV Ad Buying Platform

In the first round of usability testing, a participant paused on the word “spots,” then asked, “Do you mean commercials?” The participant wasn’t wrong. Comcast Advertising had spent decades selling linear TV ads through account executives who spoke media-buying fluently. Now it was trying to let small and “super-small” businesses buy the same inventory themselves. I was lead designer on the U.S.’s first self-service linear TV platform (Effectv, now Comcast Advertising), and the first round of testing made clear the interface wasn’t the hardest problem. The language was.

The challenge

Comcast Advertising had long relied on account executives to manage TV campaigns for larger clients. That high-touch model worked for enterprise accounts, but it didn’t scale to smaller businesses with limited budgets, little time, and no familiarity with industry language.

For self-service to work, the product had to do two things at once: simplify campaign planning and purchase into a guided digital workflow, and make the language of media buying understandable to people who knew their businesses, not the ad industry. Early concepts made the core problem clear. The experience was too click-heavy, too jargon-filled, and too intimidating for the audience it was intended to serve.

Designing for self-service, not expert workflows

I designed the experience end to end: prototypes, usability testing, validated decisions translated into production UI. The platform shipped as a progressive web app to support business owners managing campaigns on the go. Core flows included onboarding, campaign setup, ad planning, performance dashboards, and browser-based commercial creation. The goal wasn’t to digitize existing internal processes, but to rebuild them around the needs and confidence level of a first-time advertiser.

The work happened inside a three-way relationship: Comcast had a POV on the product, a Cognizant engineering team carried the build under SOW, and design had to thread the needle between them. I served as the day-to-day point of contact between Comcast and Cognizant, which made the design lead a translation layer in two directions at once: for the user-facing language problem, and for the working relationships that produced the product.

Treating language as a core UX problem

Usability testing showed that layout and navigation were not the only barriers, and often not even the biggest ones. Language was a major source of friction. Terms like “spots,” “inventory,” and “linear opportunities” made users hesitate because the product was speaking the language of the media business rather than the language of a small business owner.

I rewrote the experience in plainer, more confidence-building language, added contextual explanations for unfamiliar concepts, and shifted the overall tone from transactional to supportive. That change turned TV advertising from something intimidating into something users could actually understand.

Using testing to prove the simplification worked

We held the team to a clear UX goal: reduce unnecessary clicks and make core tasks meaningfully faster. Through iterative usability testing, I measured both click reduction and time to completion on near-final prototypes. The results showed the workflow was measurably faster to complete and required fewer clicks to get there.

Results and impact

The redesign improved SUS from 41 to 72 across five iterative rounds of testing, reduced clicks per task by more than 40%, and cut task completion time by roughly 50%. User feedback shifted from confusion and hesitation to clarity and confidence, and Comcast Advertising shipped the country’s first self-service linear TV platform for small businesses.

Reflection

This project reinforced one of the most important lessons of my design career: clarity is a product feature.

Self-service experiences don’t fail only because the interface is clumsy. They fail when the structure, language, and mental model all assume more expertise than the user actually has. Cleaning up the workflow was the easier half of the work. The harder half was translating a complicated industry into language and interactions that real business owners could trust.

As a former small business owner myself, that work felt especially personal. The most rewarding moment came when early participants returned later in the pilot and finally got it: TV advertising stopped feeling intimidating and started feeling possible.