Email Design Tool
About the project
As is the case with a lot of software, an email tool developed in the 90’s was acquired by the company and efforts were put towards giving it a technical refresh. While it did it’s job, the tool was clunky, slow and caused a lot users frustration. My team was tasked with redesigning the email design tool to bring it up to standards both from a back-end and user experience perspective. This project started about 3 years ago and still on-going. However, the refresh is complete and we are now adding net new feature capabilities to the system.
A glimpse at the old tool UX
A small sample of the redesign
My process
The first thing I did when I was put on this project was to sit down with the triad and discuss a strategy for research and design. Given that I was the new member on the team, it was important to carve out time for me to learn the existing software and talk to clients who are using it on a daily basis.
The team agreed to do some preliminary research both quantitatively and qualitatively via surveys and semi-structured interviews. We then used this to formulate and define our strategy and goals for moving forward.
Our team used various techniques to evaluate how we might be able to add the most value to the customer in a timely fashion. We used a mixture of heuristic evaluation of needs and other business models such as the Kano model to decide which features to work on first.
UX Research
I lead multiple research sessions during this phase of the project, from qualitative user research calls, to quantitative heuristic evaluation of the current system. This data helped inform key problem areas for us to focus on that often extended outside of the visual refresh of the tool. We found that things like redesigning the user workflow and wait times for batch sending were of the most common asks and complaints our users were having.
Once we had started the overhaul of the email design tool, we utilized MixPanel to track how many users were switching over to use the new design experience, even though it didn’t yet have all of the functionality that the old tool had.
To do this, we gave users the option to freely switch back and forth between the two designers, in context. We found that once we had hit about 80% parity with what the old system had, users began to switch over in mass. We were then quickly able to decommission the old tool and move forward with the new and approved canvas.
The outcome
At the end of this process, we reflected back on our work and realized that we’re successful in our efforts to delight our customers through a better, more delightful user experience as well as an upgrade to the backend services that supported the tool. We even saw a big increase in adoption:
Data is from MixPanel and is purposefully cropped to preserve sensitive company data.
Additionally, we were able to reach our stretch goals of making the tool WCAG 2.0 compliant and now are focusing on net-new features to add to the product to further add value to our users.
Simple click-through prototype of the final outcome: https://blackbaud.invisionapp.com/share/S7GJBEMWTZ5
