Context
Building an audience, one segment at a time
Select is where people at Media.net create programmatic deals. On a deal's Audiences step they decide who it should reach, by picking segments from a library of many data vendors.
Audience IQ is a tool that suggests and builds audience segments for a deal. You type a short brief, and it comes back with ready-made custom audiences. I designed it from the first concepts in March 2026 to the October 2026 release.
Type what you are after, like "premium high-value shoppers".
AI suggests custom audiences, each one a combination of segments.
Every suggestion shows its price, and a running total adds it all up.
It lives in the segment search, on the deal's Audiences step.
The problem
People think in briefs. The library speaks in segment names.
Finding the right audience meant searching segment names vendor by vendor, then combining them into a custom audience with AND and OR logic. That takes time, and it takes knowing every vendor's naming.
Briefs do not arrive as segment names. They arrive as a description of people.
Let someone describe an audience in their own words and get a ready-made one, without leaving the deal they are creating?
Related work
Custom Audience: build your own
Audience IQ suggests custom audiences. Alongside it, I designed Custom Audience, where people build their own. They can describe it in AI Chat, or put it together by hand: drag segments from the library into groups, choose All of or Any of, and combine groups with AND or OR.
Drag, drop, and let AI fill the gaps
The builder starts empty, with a drop zone that says exactly what to do. Drop the first segment and the insights wake up: total avails, total cost and a plain-language summary of who you are reaching. Each group suggests related segments you can add in one click, and the logical expression underneath writes out the result, so the AND and OR logic is never a guess. Step through the build below.
How they fit together
Custom Audience is for building an audience from scratch with full control. Audience IQ brings ready-made custom audiences straight into the deal, inside the segment search people already use.
What shipped
AI inside the search
The segment search now carries an AI icon. Type a brief and Audience IQ works on it while the ordinary keyword results stay usable. Suggestions arrive in their own panel at the top: a few custom audiences, each with a name, a short description, a price and a + to add it. Keyword results sit underneath as before, and the Total cost bar adds up flat and percentage prices.
Iterations
Shaped by reviews
Reviews with product and QA shaped the design from the first concept to launch. The biggest change was where the suggestions live and how they look.
Out of the accordion. Suggestions moved out of a Custom Audiences accordion to the top of the library.
Look like AI. Their own panel and background, so they do not read as search results.
Label once. A tag on every card felt repetitive, so one label and a subtitle cover the whole panel.
Cost that adds up. The total includes segments priced as a percentage, not just flat prices.
Small fixes. An AI icon in the search, subtitles, and a hover for long segment names.
The details
One popover for every detail
Cards keep titles and descriptions to two lines so the panel stays scannable. At first, the full title, the description and the audience expression each had their own tooltip. I combined them into one popover: full title, price and description, then the expression as a list of segments, each with its source and price.
Design system
Built from the Select Design System
Audience IQ is made from the Select Design System: its inputs, cards, tooltips, popovers and colour tokens. New AI states, like the loading panel and the suggestion cards, use the same parts as the rest of the product, so they feel native rather than bolted on.
What I learned
Designing AI into a busy flow
A brilliant separate tool loses to a good one in the place people already work.
A distinct panel and label set the right expectations, and kept AI suggestions apart from exact search matches.
One popover beat three tooltips: people get the whole story with a single hover.