BOOM! “THE BIG RELEASE”

Greetings, it’s with great pleasure that I introduce to you the first piece of, what we’re calling internally, “THE BIG RELEASE”. It’s not our typical weekly release of subtle improvements, so, without further ado…

How This Is Going To Go Down

This is a BIG release; there’s a lot in here – too much so for one blog post – so we’re going to talk about different aspects of this release over the next week or so, until we have covered everything. For this first post, we’ll cover the most important change: BSA’s Information Architecture.

New Information Architecture
We condensed Buy Ads, Sell Ads, Advertisers, and Publishers down to: Buy Ads and Sell Ads. The previous distinction was not entirely clear for some of the views in the app, and making our primary navigation simpler made a lot of sense.

Some of the key information architecture changes that you should be aware of:

• Transactions: we have consolidated Advertiser and Publisher transactions into one single report at My Account > Transaction History.
• Advertiser Billing: this has been moved to My Account > Billing & Deposit.
• Advertiser Dashboard: we have merged the Buy Ads and Advertisers section into Buy Ads. You can find your ads under Buy Ads > My Ads.
• Publisher Dashboard: we have merged the Sell Ads and Publishers section into Sell Ads. You can find your properties under Sell Ads > Properties.

The design of the “Cart” was spruced up to make it stand out and feel like more of a destination within the site vs. a regular navigation item. You can see some of the evolution of the new look for the cart over on Forrst.

We also brought most of the “fluff” (twitter follow button, blog, home, logout, etc.) into the footer or removed it completely. The result is a much simpler information architecture for the site and fewer links in the header which allowed us to make the more important ones feel more important.

The changes to BSA’s information architecture are a small, but important, part of THE BIG RELEASE. Look out for new blog posts every day for the next couple weeks as we get into more details about the new features that are part of THE BIG RELEASE.