STEALTH STARTUP

Changing TVs for the Better

I joined a stealth startup within Samsung’s Visual Display division. I was Employee #4, and the sole designer for year one and expanded and led the Ad UX team. Our team had the ambition to change the way we perceive and work in the linear TV industry. As the head of design for Samsung Ads, I helped my team explore the potential to take the most notorious part of the TV viewing experience and turn it into something that added value to the overall experience.

Design Principles

As the design founder, I worked to evangelize and create a design-centric environment in a non-design team. I established design principles and held design seminars for the engineers and product managers on a regular basis.

Storytelling

Design starts at the constraint.

Understand the scope and guide the user from the start to the end goal. Design with intention and make the user flow effortless and enjoyable.

Hierarchy

Design is efficient.

Knowing where to start is key to the experience. Clearly, telling the user what is important through good design and hierarchy. Being consistent will help the user understand design.

User-Centered

Design is about the user.

Ego has no place. Start with the user's needs and craft contextual experiences. Clearly, define the design's objectives and solve them first. Be accurate and concise.

Seamless

Great design is invisible.

Sweat the details. The more effort put into the design, the less effort a user has to take to understand it. Design intuitive and universal experiences without sacrificing quality.

Simplicity

Design is clear and concise.

Keep it simple stupid. Show the user only what they need when they need it. Stay honest and keep your intentions transparent. The user should always know what they are getting into.

Extraordinary

Design is the difference between ordinary and extraordinary.

Delight the user and exceed their expectations. Spend time designing solid experiences, and then take the time to make them extraordinary.

VAST Importer

Video Ad Serving Template or VAST is an industry-standard template created to serve electronic video ads. In order to create immersive on-demand ad experiences, Samsung needed to adopt and deploy VAST compliant players and ingestion engines to our ad servers. I was responsible for taking the VAST specs and creating a video player interface and oversaw the development and deployment of the player to all of the Samsung Smart TV's worldwide. I also designed and helped implement the UI for uploading or ingesting VAST creatives to our platform enabling our customers to rapidly scale out their campaigns on Samsung TVs.

VAST Import Flow

Real-Time Analytics

Our team worked hard on optimizing our platform, and we wanted to show the power of our platform in real-time. I developed the basis of a design language that allowed users to view our data as it came in.

Platform Guidelines

As the Head of Design for Samsung's brand new Ad Platform, a part of my responsibility was educating our advertising customers on how to help best them succeed, as well as protect Samsung consumers from potentially catastrophic experiences. As apart of this effort, I created the official Samsung Ad Platform Guidelines. We offered our agency partners a comprehensive document with our recommendations and created shorter rules cheat sheet for our customers to review before uploading their assets to our platform.