Overview

DURATION

Sep. 2018 - May 2018

TEAM/ROLE

1 Designers, 1 Engineer, 1 Project Manager / UX Research and Design Intern

SKILLS

User Research, Product Thinking, Interaction Design, UI Design

TOOLS

Sketch

Context

If you’re a college student, email is the most common way to professionally connect with others. We use email to stay up-to-date about almost everything. If you are a club leader, mass email is an essential way to reach other students about announcements, upcoming events, and more. However, I’ve come to discover that many of my peers find sending these emails ineffective at times, and frankly, a pain to manage.

I initially believed that emailing had the potential to be the most powerful promotion tool—which is why I was intrigued that my fellow students were having such negative experiences with email marketing when it came to promoting and conducting events. So, I dug deeper to understand where the process of managing and sending mass emails was going wrong.

Research

We set out to understand how student group leaders use email to interact with their audience about events, and uncover the pain points of these interaction methods, as well as the behaviors and feelings behind these interaction methods. In other words, what do people do now and where do the platforms they currently use lack? We focused specifically on two aspects of the email and event process:

Event inviting: How student leaders decide to advertise, promote, and market their upcoming events through email, and what they feel has been effective/ineffective for them.

Community engagement: How student leaders engage and retain their community through email, and whether they measure this community engagement (and if they do, how).

We interviewed several student group leaders, and started to notice patterns in the responses we received:

Key Insights

1. Student leaders send emails with a consistent, concise format to their audience, and try to make them as engaging as possible.

2. Student leaders send follow-up emails to remind their audience about upcoming events, but worry about sending too many irrelevant, unnecessary emails that drive their audience away.

3. Student leaders want to continually engage their community and want to widen their reach through email as much as possible.

4. Student leaders want a more streamlined and centralized platform to make the whole process of collecting emails, drafting emails, and sending emails easier.

The Problem

From these insights, I created a user persona that represent the potential primary users of the Agnes email platform in order to understand the users’ unique needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals when using the application:

People Problem

From my user research, I found that people want to strengthen their presence on campus through club events and email marketing but have a hard time doing this because:

1. sending engaging and personalized emails is a time-consuming process.

2. student leaders don’t have an effective way to collect and store emails.

Brainstorming

After a brainstorm session with my team, we identified a main opportunity space to explore: Creating a way for student group leaders to efficiently create content that reaches their entire audience.

I further delved into this opportunity space by coming up with several potential solutions to explore. Some notable features I considered were:

1. Automated personalization of emails

2. Saved email templates

3. Centralized and organized database for adding email addresses and sending emails

4. Manage and toggle between different email lists

All these solutions could work hand-in-hand to create a more robust platform for student group leaders to create better emails faster. However, we wanted to prioritize designing the most impactful and feasible option first. As we received the most feedback about wanting a centralized platform that can both collect new email addresses (such as at events) as well as send emails, we decided to go with option 3: A centralized and organized database for adding email addresses and sending emails.  

Current Experience For Adding Contacts

Agnes’ current platform (MVP stage) already allows admins to add email addresses and consequently send emails within the same dashboard platform, however…

...from user testing, users found that the current experience was extremely flawed. Users expressed that it didn’t allow inputs or details that they usually collect from their audience, such as name, major, grade, etc. in an organized fashion. Users also found the plain text input box to be vague; users didn’t know how to organize the emails, such as in list format or separated by commas.

In conclusion:

the current experience for adding and managing contacts is not interactive, unorganized, and unpersonalized.

The Solution

Re-Designing the Manage Contacts Experience

After identifying the information architecture of the current experience as well as the composition of competitors’s platforms such as Excel, Google Survey and Google Spreadsheets, which are used by many student leaders to collect email addresses at events, it was time to begin the process of bringing this feature to life. I first sketched out a potential user flow of the experience:

Medium Fidelities

From user testing the low-fidelity mockups, I was able to develop the key set of requirements for this experience, and I created the first medium-fidelity iteration of the entire flow:

User testing for the first iteration is in progress, as this is an ongoing project.