oct 2021 - apr 2023
In 2021, I helped shape Roku’s partnerships with Walmart and Shopify, enabling full-funnel advertising solutions on streaming TV. This work introduced smarter targeting, shoppable ad experiences, and closed-loop measurement — bridging brand storytelling with direct commerce outcomes.
overview & competitive landscape
With shoppable ads, I helped bring commerce and TV streaming together in a seamless flow. Viewers could press “OK” on an ad and move directly to checkout — collapsing discovery and purchase into a few clicks.
I kicked off the project with a deep audit of existing product offerings, customer shopping journeys, and brand affinity. Special attention went to big-ticket brands like Walmart, where the opportunity to merge streaming and commerce was most compelling.
To ground the vision in best practices, I audited competitive products spanning streaming, web, and mobile apps. I also studied how product experiences shifted across categories — insights that shaped our approach to shoppable ads.
Approach
Our goal was to infuse serendipity into the shopping journey: moments of delight like discovering an easter egg, stumbling on an irresistible offer, or seizing a timed discount that nudged users to act quickly.
Partnering with Product Marketing and User Research, I facilitated multiple rounds of usability studies to identify the triggers and behaviors that would make shopping on TV both intuitive and desirable.
how users shop
Explore — Analyze — Review — Purchase
Collaborating with Product, I mapped the user intent funnel and uncovered a key insight: although we enabled on-screen purchases, our partners were most interested in driving exploration and consideration. This shaped the UX strategy — leaning heavily on rich product imagery and discovery flows, while still supporting seamless checkout.
evaluating the ideal information architecture
Includes all production ready attributes
By mapping the end-to-end purchase journey, I identified the key decision points and structured the information architecture for checkout — ensuring clarity of information hierarchy, and reduced friction for users.
Using usability feedback and insights on brand trust, I designed the checkout experience to encourage exploration while enabling impulse purchases, creating a seamless path from discovery to conversion.
enhancing trust with brand adherence
I worked with our visual designer to build a design system and defined variables of change, enabling software engineering to plan which parts of the UI should be built for customization.
Worked with the Walmart and Shopify design teams to validate that the approach could support diverse product categories and merchants, enabling engineering to build a scalable system.
SUPPORTING product variations
I began by thoroughly understanding and documenting the product variations and types we aimed to support. From there, I tested how our existing IA could scale to these options, while also experimenting with more creative approaches to enhance flexibility and user experience.
Includes all production ready attributes
I made certain that our design could accommodate every planned product category and configuration, creating a flexible framework ready to scale with future offerings.
I prototyped text-only, image-only, and color-based variations to demonstrate the full scale of our design. This ensured engineering could architect systems that supported flexibility and future growth.
Outcomes
"This is a market that is a multibillion dollar – many multibillion dollar market that just traditionally was not even tapped into by TV platforms. We have so much opportunity to experiment with this type of interactivity adding value to the viewing experience. "
— CEO, Anthony Wood
The suite of ad offerings I worked on during my time at Roku has bolstered the company as a dominant leader in the ads space, accounting more than 49% of it's revenue. Thankful to have been a part of this initiative.
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