Consolidating Email on Commission into Ad Portal

Overview

Ad Portal is Sojern's platform for Customer Success Managers, digital designers, and internal teams to set up, manage, and report on advertising and email marketing campaigns for hotel, destination, and corporate clients. As Sojern consolidated its Email on Commission product, previously run through a legacy platform called the Guest Experience Platform, into Ad Portal, the existing navigation had no clear home for the incoming functionality.

I worked alongside a senior designer on the research, information architecture, and visual design behind the migration, contributing across navigation strategy, cross-functional workshops, and page-level redesign. My focus was making sure a whole set of new features could land in Ad Portal without making an already busy navigation harder to use.

Problem

Ad Portal's navigation had grown into a dense list of more than fourteen sections with no consistent structure, inconsistent active states, and no clear grouping logic. That was already creating friction for CSMs before the migration began.

Layering a whole new set of functionality onto that structure (account configuration, merge tags, guest audiences, email performance) risked making a strained navigation worse. It also meant moving a group of people into a product they had never opened. The digital designers who build the email campaigns had worked only in the legacy platform, so their daily tools were about to reappear in an unfamiliar interface, arranged by a logic that had never accounted for their work.

• Fix the underlying navigation model A flat list of fourteen plus sections taught a different mental model in every section.
• Find the right home for an incoming product Email on Commission was arriving from a different system and needed a logical destination.
• Keep its users working through the move The digital designers who run those campaigns were new to Ad Portal. They had to find their tools in a busy interface and carry on without relearning their job.

Research

I collaborated with a senior designer throughout and grounded the work in how people actually use Ad Portal today, not on the assumption that the new IA could simply bolt the incoming product on top of the existing structure. Some pieces I owned end to end, and others I contributed to as part of a wider effort.

Navigation audit

I ran a structured UX audit of the current Ad Portal side navigation, looking at hierarchy, active states, consistency, and interaction behaviour. It surfaced thirteen findings with a single common root cause: the navigation taught users a different mental model in every section.

Parent items behaved inconsistently on click. Some auto-selected a child, some landed on their own page, and one jumped straight to the second tab instead of the first. Active-state indicators disappeared when a child page was current, and the collapsed icon-only view gave no location feedback at all. This told me that before the incoming product could be placed anywhere, the container itself needed a clearer, more predictable structure.

A walk through the audit board, moving across the findings from active-state and breadcrumb issues to navigation density.

Annotated audit screens showing the inconsistent active states and click behaviour across sections.

User and CSM research

Alongside the audit, I drew on a broader body of CSM research: working sessions with Hotel, Destination, and APAC segment CSMs, plus a survey of twenty-two respondents. I participated in these sessions, which were led by a senior designer. They consistently showed CSMs stitching workflows together across Ad Portal, Salesforce, Tableau, and personal spreadsheets, because Portal's existing structure did not map to how they worked account to account. That reinforced what the audit had already surfaced: navigation needed to follow how CSMs actually move through their work, not read as a flat, alphabetised list of every feature.

A walkthrough of the 22-person CSM survey synthesis. Verbatim quotes and internal detail are omitted here.

Workshop with digital designers

Because digital designers are the primary users of this functionality, I led a dedicated card-sorting workshop with them to understand where they instinctively expected the incoming pages to live inside Ad Portal. On a Figma board, we sorted individual building blocks (account configuration, PMS integration, merge tags, guest audience lists and segmentation, and the email performance dashboard) against the proposed IA groupings.

Placement was mostly intuitive. PMS integration and merge tags fit naturally under Accounts, and audience lists under Audiences. A few items exposed real ambiguity worth resolving deliberately, not by default, most notably whether email performance belonged under Dashboards or Reporting, since Ad Portal already used both terms inconsistently for similar content.

Card-sorting workshop board. Digital designers sorted the incoming building blocks against the proposed groupings, which surfaced both the intuitive placements and the genuine edge cases.

Competitive research

To check those internal signals against how the rest of the industry solves this, I then audited nine comparable multi-product platforms for how they structure navigation. The pattern worth borrowing: group by user intent (setup, monitoring, resolution), not by product name, and keep configuration visually distinct from reporting.

Mapping the information architecture

With the audit findings, workshop input, and competitive patterns in hand, I worked with the senior designer to map the current Ad Portal navigation in full, so we could see where the fragmentation was actually happening before deciding where the new pages should sit.

What the map showed was a flat structure. Fourteen top-level sections sat side by side with no grouping logic connecting them. Commission and Managed Campaign each appeared twice, under both Campaigns and Creatives. Billing's two pages were the same screen reached two ways. Most of the real depth was hidden inside in-page tabs rather than expressed in the navigation itself. That is part of why the audit's core finding, that there was no single rule the interface taught users, held true.

Information architecture before the redesign

Three versions of the navigation

Layering those pages onto that structure could go several ways, so we built three versions and reviewed them with the design and product team.

1. Flat list, pages distributed. Kept the existing flat top-level list, distributing Account Configuration, PMS Integration, and Merge Tags into Accounts, Guest Audiences into a new Audiences section, and Email Performance into Dashboards.
2. Same list, tighter naming. Tightened the naming and removed a duplicate Merge Tags placement under Asset Management to cut redundancy, but left the flat top level as it was.
3. Grouped by intent. Kept those same placements and added three intent-based groups above them, turning the long flat list into something scannable.

What we chose and why

We chose Version 3. Versions 1 and 2 both gave Email on Commission a home, but they left the structural problem the audit had flagged exactly as it was: a flat list that taught users nothing about how the product is organised. Version 3 solved both at once by grouping the sections around what people had come to do. Workspace holds Accounts, Campaigns, Asset Management, Programs, and Audience, the day-to-day setup and management surfaces. Insights holds Dashboards and Reporting, where monitoring and analysis happen. Resolve holds Billing and Help, where users go when something needs fixing. That gave the incoming functionality a logical destination instead of forcing a new top-level category of its own.

It also matched the mental model CSMs and digital designers had already described in research: setup and day-to-day account work in one place, performance and monitoring in another, and billing and support as a distinct third bucket. Card-sorting had confirmed that PMS integration, merge tags, and account configuration read naturally as Accounts work, while audience and segmentation data read as its own category, both of which Version 3 preserved while adding the missing top-level clarity.

Information architecture after the redesign

Email on Commission pages redesign

With the navigation home settled, I turned to the screens themselves, which were migrating out of the legacy platform's older interface. I led the redesign of the integration and account configuration screens and carried the work through the audiences section, partnering with engineering and the CSM and onboarding teams who configure these settings. Across that work I:

• Consolidated three legacy screens into one The legacy platform's separate Venue Information, Guest Engagement Options, and Common Options screens became a single Email and Commission section under Account Configuration, since the underlying fields were all set by the same users at the same point in a property's lifecycle.
• Kept a pattern users were already fluent in Retained the existing toggle-based interaction for configuration flags (cart abandonment, external email validation, PMS opt-out overrides, AI email builder, guest name display) instead of introducing checkboxes, since CSM and onboarding teams already knew that pattern from the legacy platform and a mid-migration control change would have added needless relearning.
• Rebuilt the visual layer Every migrated screen was brought in line with Sojern's current brand guidelines and Ad Portal's UI kit, replacing the older visual language with Portal-native components, spacing, and type.
• Preserved proven flows Merge Tags and Audience (Lists and Segments) management carried over with their existing import, export, and filtering intact, since research confirmed CSMs relied on it as-is and Phase 1 focused on new configuration needs.

I worked with product management to sequence this as a phased rollout, prioritising net-new configuration screens that needed design support first while deliberately not duplicating settings that already lived elsewhere in Portal. Throughout, I partnered with engineering so that field-level requirements, such as the Reference ID needed to generate unsubscribe links, were captured accurately in the handoff.

The redesigned account page rebuilt in Portal-native components, from the reconciliation Status Center down to the empty-state PMS integration.

The redesigned Connect PMS screen, where a property picks its PMS provider from a searchable list and configures the SMS integration in Portal-native components.

The redesigned Merge tags screen, with substitution fields grouped into collapsible sections and rebuilt in Portal-native components.

Outcomes

• A predictable, task-aligned structure Replaced a flat, inconsistent navigation of more than fourteen sections with a three-tier grouping model (Workspace, Insights, Resolve) that gives every item, old and newly migrated, a home that follows how people work.
• The people moving in could find their work Each migrated page landed where its users already expected it, so a team new to Ad Portal could find their daily tools using the mental model they arrived with.
• One system of record Retired the legacy platform as a separate system for email and commission configuration, consolidating CSM and onboarding workflows into a single platform.
• Settled a longstanding naming ambiguity Resolved the internal "dashboards versus reporting" inconsistency as part of the IA decision, before it could carry into the new structure by default.