What was wrong

I started by mapping how a campaign actually moved, from the brand's first search to the final report. Working through it with the CultureX team and brand reps, the same three leaks kept coming up.

Brands ran campaigns across too many apps

Every brief, file and reply landed in a different app. Nothing was the source of truth, so every round started with: which version is this?

Discovering creators took hours

Brands spent hours on Instagram profiles to find the right influencer.

Campaigns at scale were hard to manage

Every new creator added a thread. Past a dozen, nobody knew who was on which step.

Three user groups in every campaign

Every campaign brings together three kinds of users, and each needs something different from the same page.

• Brands

  Cares about visibility

  01
  Is every creator moving, and which one is stuck?

• Creators

  Cares about the next step

  02
  The brief, the script, the feedback and the deadline, in one place.

• CultureX team

  Cares about throughput

  03
  Onboard both sides, unblock deliverables, close out every report.

My assumption was that creators were the core of the product. They execute the campaigns and live on Instagram, so I expected them to run campaigns from their phones. To test that, I interviewed five creators and surveyed thirty.

I was wrong. Two in three run campaigns from a laptop, where their scripts, files and edits already live. So the product had to be desktop first, then responsive, not the other way round.

But before a campaign can have a state, it needs creators, and that is where brands lost the most time. So the first thing we built was creator discovery.

Solution 1: Global Search for creator discovery

Global Search is a catalogue of every creator on the platform, filtered down to the brief.

The filters were the product. They decide whether search beats scrolling Instagram or just becomes another place to scroll, so most of the research time went into which ones brands actually reach for.

1

1. 1Filters for the creator and their audience

   More than 25: age, followers, reel plays, engagement rate, language, location, even a line remembered from a creator's bio.

2. 2Every category counts
3. 3Previous filters

The shortlist then goes straight into the campaign: select creators, add them, and the invitations go out from the same screen. Finding creators dropped from about two hours to thirty minutes.

Solution 2: Campaign management on one page

The campaign page is where both sides spend their time, and it carries a lot: the brief, the product, the brand's key points, the script, the video, the live post, the numbers after it, and every round of feedback.

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Status

Where the campaign is, and the next step, in words.

1. 01Status
2. 02My tasks
3. 03Campaign details
4. 04Key points
5. 05Feedback

01 · Status. Where the campaign is, and the next step, in words.

The status bar carries the page's most useful decision. It doesn't only show where the campaign is; it says what happens next, in a sentence. A progress bar that only shows position is a receipt. One that names the next step is a to-do.

Campaign liveView updates

You're in. Time to write the script

Next step: Draft the script

Start

Script

Script due

Video

Live

Insights

Complete

ProgressNot shared

Submission by18 Aug, 20256 days left

Script · Script due

Managing big campaigns

On a big campaign, the counts slip first. The Campaign Overview gives brand managers four numbers (scripts completed, videos in review, deliverables live, insights received) and a week of activity, so they see what's stuck before anyone asks.

A/B testing

A third of creators also work from a phone, where the segments can't sit side by side, so their order is the design. I A/B tested sixteen mobile iterations with eight creators. The order that won follows the creator's own questions, top to bottom.

System that builds

Three months, two developers, one designer. What held it together was a shared vocabulary between design and engineering, agreed before the first screen.

That vocabulary was V-Flux, the design system I made, interactions included: 90+ reusable patterns the developers built against.

Impact

The problem was hours lost, so impact is measured in hours won back: time on the same tasks, before the platform and after it. I followed up with the CultureX managers for these numbers.

The MVP was presented at a company all-hands, and it landed well.

• 75%timereducedDiscovering creatorsGlobal Search's 25+ filters replaced hours on Instagram profiles.
• 63%timereducedDrafting deliverablesThe brief, key points and script editor sit on one page.
• 50%timereducedBrands reviewing deliverablesVersioned feedback ended the which-version question.
• 21×moreproductiveBrands running campaignsWith the hours back, brands run far more campaigns in the same time.

  12

  251

  +239

  BeforeAfter

  Brands

  40

  128

  +88

  BeforeAfter

  Campaigns

What I'd take into the next one

Test the assumption before designing for it

I was sure creators ran campaigns from their phones, and a phone-first product would have followed. Five interviews and a thirty-person survey said laptop. A small round of research kept us from building for the wrong screen.

A tight timeline forces the real question

Three months left no room to design everything, so every screen had to answer one question for one person. That constraint is the reason the campaign page has segments at all.

Impact is the measure, not polish

Success isn't how easy the product feels or how good it looks. It's how well it solves the problem, and how big that change is. I went back to the managers for the KPIs, and those numbers are how I judge whether this product worked.