Email Message Designer
Opportunity
As part of the initiative to move towards a content creation centric platform, we embarked to design a tool that gives users the ability to create a message during the campaign setup process. This tool, Email Message Designer (EMD), was intended for Visual Designers, Email & Web Developer and Campaign Specialists.
Research
As part of learning about creating and launching an email campaign, I arranged group interviews and shadowing sessions with people who played a role in sending an email. The participants were 4 visual designers, 3 email & web developer and 3 campaign specialists. The main goal was to understand how emails messages were designed and coded, and how personalization rules were applied to a message.
I was interested in learning about the individuals' interactions with their customers, team collaboration, types of deliverables, day to day responsibilities and tools used.
Group interview questionnaire
Example of email message design deliverable
Findings
In my research findings, I concluded that the product goals did not meet the needs of our users. Designers and Email & Web Developers will continue to use the tools they already use, and Campaign Specialists are not involved in creating or designing the message.
Iterations
After reevaluating the user needs, the product’s goal shifted from creating a message to personalizing content within a message.
Visual canvas wireframe
Dynamic Rules Editor wireframe
In the first iterations of EMD, I focused on giving the users the ability to create content regions for personalization in the message itself. The users could view the resolution of these personalization rules in context.
In this view editing and reviewing content were available.
In the Dynamic Rules Editor users are able to create personalization rules that resolve on a specific piece of content.
The drag and drop interface provided an intuitive way to create rule conditions using personalization, behavioral and transactional data. When these rule conditions are met, a specific piece of content is displayed in the message.
Current version
Many of the features added throughout the years were driven by user feedback, learned usage patterns, and user and business needs. The main usability goal we always strived for in EMD has been to simplify the content personalization workflow in order to speed up the overall process.
The current version of the Email Message Designer (EMD) offers the ability to code using pure HTML. This was a fundamental technical improvement that gave us the chance to add key features and modernize the interaction design of this product. Among the many features that have been added to EMD are message templates and widgets. The new interaction model supports drag and drop which cuts down the number of clicks required to create a content region and adding a widget to it.
The dynamic rules editor also went through a series of revisions as we observed usage patterns and learned from them. For example, we saw that bigger enterprises used multiple data sources with large quantities of data when creating personalization rules. A big design challenge that I tackled was providing an easy way for users to access and work with large quantities of data. In my solution, the users select the specific data attributes across all the available data sources that will be used for personalization. With a smaller set of data attributes, the campaign specialist is more efficient in building personalization rules.
Results
This was a multi-year project that evolved tremendously. Throughout its existence, 30+ features have been added including approval workflow, multivariate testing, message templates, content widgets, and rule sets to name a few. The Email Message Designer is a key product of the Responsys suite.