Enterprise Messaging & Campaign Platform

Businesses come to the provider to reach large audiences by text: a retailer announcing a sale, a brand opening a new branch, a political group campaigning before an election. Every campaign needs a message and a sender name, the "number mask" recipients see instead of a phone number. The audience can be the client's own customer list, or new people across the provider's affiliated mobile networks, filtered by location and interests without the client ever seeing those numbers. Clients pay by reach, frequency and message length.

Campaigns arrive in two ways. Most clients hand their message and audience to the provider, and its staff set the campaign up for them. VIP clients log in to a self-service portal, buy credits and run their own.

I never had direct access to the client, who stayed anonymous throughout. Requirements came through a third-party business analyst, as written documents and one-to-one interviews, and finished designs were reviewed in anonymous online meetings the analyst set up. The brief for the messaging flow itself was one written sentence. Bulk messaging was also new to me, so I learned the domain as I designed.

Seven insights shaped the product. Every message needs a sign-off, but not from the same place. One campaign often means several messages for different audiences or days. Audiences come from very different sources, each needing different inputs. Everyone needs to understand the cost before committing. Repeat clients send similar messages, and retyping them caused mistakes. Staff had no sense of what still needed completing, or where a submitted campaign stood. And staff work in long sessions, so visual comfort mattered as much as speed.

The product has two parts. The user portal, for provider staff and VIP clients, holds a dashboard of reach, impressions and spend; campaigns in table and calendar views; a quick campaign path; approvals, shown only to approver and admin-level users; saved number lists and templates; an inbox; and a credits wallet in the top bar. The admin console gives the provider campaign approvals, client and admin accounts, users, policies, rate cards and reports, including delivery status reports.

A campaign is made up of one or more ad groups, each with its own message, target group and schedule, so one campaign can send different messages to different audiences at different times. The message composer covers channel (SMS, Push or MMS), language and sender name, with a live character counter and an opt-out line added automatically. Scheduling covers dates, running days, time belts, repeats and a delivery method: even, accelerated or continuous.

The design ran through several dated rounds of redesign: internal review with senior management and the dev team, then client review through the analyst. My first campaign form was a step-by-step flow with a progress bar, which the client didn't want. I redesigned it as a single screen with every section visible; each section opens its own popup as you fill it in, and "Send for approval" only becomes active once every required section is complete, which shows progress without a progress bar. I also explored a dark theme, but the client chose a single light theme for long working sessions.

The interface is entirely in English. I chose Lato because its rounded, evenly weighted letterforms feel familiar to readers used to the rounded shapes of Sinhala and Tamil scripts, which makes English text easier on the eye. Type runs from 12 to 20 px in the product, with generous white space, in a single light theme suited to long working sessions.

As the sole designer working with one frontend developer, two backend developers, a QA engineer, a DevOps engineer and two members of senior management, I handed over a Figma design system of colour and text styles, around 140 components, and a status label for every campaign state; reusable components for the trickier controls, including date and time pickers, audience selection and campaign selection; detailed annotations on every screen; and walkthrough sessions with the developers.

The platform was fully built and ready for launch: a complete replacement for an expensive foreign system, with a self-service portal for VIP clients, an admin console for accounts, pricing, policies and reporting, one flexible permission model, clear audience counts and cost breakdowns before every submission, multi-ad-group campaigns with flexible scheduling, and personalised templates. Launch was paused when the client exited the mass messaging market, so there is no usage data to report.