Email Message Designer

Opportunity

As part of the initiative to move towards a content creation centric platform, we set off 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 ran a series of group interviews and shadowing sessions with people who played a role in the sending of emails. The participants were 4 visual designers, 3 email & web developer and 3 campaign specialists.

The main goal was to understand how email messages were designed and coded as well as 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 the tools they used.

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.

Design Objectives

After reevaluating the user needs, the product’s goal shifted from creating a message to personalizing content within a message.

Iterations

First Version

There are two important pieces to this product - the message and the rules. They both serve different purposes but at they are dependent of each other to achieve a highly personalized email message.

Message

In the first iterations of EMD, I focused on giving the users the ability to edit and review content, and create content regions for personalization in context . These actions were available in the canvas environment.

The ability to cycle through the rules and see the content in context provides great time-savings benefits to the users.

Dynamic Rules Editor

In the Dynamic Rules Editor the users can create personalization rules using personalization, behavioral and transactional data. When these rule conditions are met, a specific piece of content is displayed in the message.

The drag and drop interface provided an intuitive way to build the rule conditions.

Visual mocks

Current version

Many of the features have been added over the years were driven by user feedback, learned usage patterns, and user as well as 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, 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.