How I built a creative universe
I created the 1st horizontal UX framework for creative building, tying together disparate efforts across multiple teams. This effort directly supported ads creation for Amazon Ads with an average 275M+ monthly ad-supported reach.
Role
UX Design Manager
Products
20+ launches
Company
Amazon Inc.
Year
2023 - 2025
LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS
I built the team and structure to enable a holistic approach to creative builders across over 6 different products in 3 different Ads systems. Prior to my ownership, no one team or designer had a complete understanding of how these creative tools connect with each other or impact the ads system. These included the most accessed and impactful ad products like Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV.
As a UX leader in Creative Building Ads, working at the latest cutting edge of this space, I led to significant growth and excitement on what can be achieved and how. With a consistent approach to what could be common, and what needed to be custom, I led the charter, established tenets and built a UX team to support it.
CO-CREATION
For non-designers or designers in a rush, the biggest challenge with creating a new creative, such as image or video, is coming up with something out of nothing. There are several solutions to this problem and a variety of tools that enable these:
Inspiration gallery: Browse through curated galleries of creatives. These galleries have creatives produced by artists and include any theme one could look for. The primary challenge is still determining which of these inspirations work, knowing how to leverage and having the knowhow to create a new one. Almost all creative tools have a version of this.
GenAI tool: Tools like Image or Video generators can generate a new creative out of nothing. A user types in what they want (in text-to-image/text-to-video) to generate and these tools create several versions. The primary challenge is knowing what to type and how to prompt these tools to produce the creative desired.
Graphic design tools: Several design tools include GenAI based capabilities within their toolbox, enabling generations that augment more controlled creations.
TRANSFORMATION
A challenge with scaling creatives across multiple platforms is the need to transform several aspects of creatives such as size, ratio, resolution, format and other requirements. Transformative tools use AI to solve for these constraints via various solutions. A few examples (not a complete list):
Upscaling: Increasing image or video size to fit higher resolutions
Out-painting: Extending background of images to fill in different aspect ratios
Background change: Identifying and erasing background, and replacing it with automatic or prompted fill
Text change: Identifying text on creative, correcting, and/or replacing with automatic or prompted text
Inpainting: Changing an object within the creative with prompted object
Recolor: Smart change/application of colors
RECOMMENDATION
With an abundance of options, and an abundance of formats and platforms, knowing which creative would work where can be confusing. Determining compatibility across the plethora of platforms and suggesting the right asset/tool/creative at the right point in the journey would be an idealized state to support users. A few ways recommendation works:
Component recommendation: Smart suggestion of specific components like image/headline/video
Style recommendation: Smart suggestion of brand based styles like colors, font, theme
Tool recommendation: Smart suggestion of transformative capabilities like color-correction, upscaling, text change and so on
I lead products and team on creative building ad experiences. Chat with me on why democratization of creative building is such an advantage to creatives and designers.