Project Overview
Update our flagship product with a new feature that pushes the bounds of personalization.
Role
Sole designer
Deliverables
Mockups, prototypes, user research, and competitive analysis.
Objective
Make it possible to design one email that dynamically displays countless types of content
From the inception of our email builder tool, we had “merge tags” the little brackets that turn “Hey [first_name]” into “Hey Joe”. But, our users and their contacts had grown way past that alongside the rest of the smartphone wielding world. Our users needed to be able to build completely dynamic emails, that could swap out based on language, gender, region, or any number of other fields they had defined on the contact’s record. Oh… and we needed it to have fallbacks in place in case a contact didn’t have said field.
Research
User interviews, competitive analysis, internal research of our own desktop offering
I began by researching competitors, and how they were solving for the high level of personalization users demanded. I also met with product management, engineering, and internal users to further understand what technical hurdles we may face. I built out some maps (simplified for legibility below) to confirm we were all on the same page and then began formulating two solutions.
Being that this would have high visibility and be a very engineering intensive project, I began user testing the two solutions I had alongside the Product Manager.
Learnings
Users time and time again preferred some combination of the two, so I went back to the drawing board, and combined the best of each solution, creating a cohesive experience that had been vetted with users.
Solutions
Through research and prototypes:
- I designed a reusable segment based approach, that allowed users to use the same segments on any number of emails.
- I defined the core elements that users would need to have dynamic options for.
- I designed a solution that allowed users to test an email, impersonating any contact in their database, to see what the email would look like for them.
Impact
Users have expressed delight with dynamic email content, with many noting how much quicker they can build emails.
It’s helpful hearing from users how the work we put in is helping them. It’s not why we do it, but it helps us know that we’re continuing to make awesome products that they want to use, rather than have to use.
