You’ve got mail!
And that brings my inbox to a total of 4,381 unread emails. Am I going to open these? Nope. Should I open them? Probably. However, the reality is that I am going to leave it in my inbox until it gets buried by another newsletter or brand email. Why do I do this, you may ask? Why, that is the modern lifestyle: you are subscribed to so many brands that anything you don’t care for, it will be a spam and remain in our inbox dungeon.
Introduction
We receive tens or hundreds of emails from brands in our inbox everyday, and the majority of them are generic and irrelevant. Though it is frustrating for receivers, customizing individual newsletters and brand emails is too difficult and expensive for most companies to implement. The easiest thing to do is sending out mass marketing campaigns.
The Challenge and Opportunity
In order for users to have control over the content that they receive in their inboxes, companies need to know about their preferences. Knowmea can transform the ways we receive our brand emails. It acts as a middleman that filters out irrelevant brand emails: users receive updates that they are interested in and at the frequency that they prefer. Knowmea allows users to create their own personal profile and then use those customized settings to search for brand content and deliver them to the users. To help users tackle their exploding inboxes, our challenge was to create a responsive website with an onboarding process for Knowmea:
An onboarding process and platform for people to select their email preferences for all brand newsletters in one convenient place.
As a team, we had three weeks to tackle this challenge. Without further ado, let’s quickly get started!
Research
Methods: domain research, competitive/comparative analysis, survey, interview, user testing, affinity map, persona
We began our design process with research. We focused our research in understanding our users and the market
Research Goals:
- Find out user demographics
- Understand user’s motivations and expectations when signing up for brand newsletter
- Determine users’ needs, paint points, and frustrations with brand emails and newsletter management
- Figure out users’ current email management behaviours
- Identify market gaps and design opportunities
Breaking the Website
To identify areas of improvements for the current website, we broke it through user testing. Three tasks were given to users to complete while we observed their actions.
At the beginning of the session, we did not say specifically what Knowmea was; we only said it was something that helps organize emails and newsletters. As one of the tasks was to find out what the product was, this will test the clarity of the current website.
We noticed a few trends and discovered some reoccurring issues:
- Automatic scrolling down the home page as people’s initial reaction to the website
- Wants to know how product works but images and words provided doesn’t show a clear idea
- Information was too text-heavy for users to digest what they were reading
- Concerns and confusions during sign-up process
- Unprofessional website design translated to unreliable product
Domain Research
To gain an initial understanding of our users and challenge, we conducted domain research on email and newsletter management. Knowing these facts and figures gave us context to our challenge.
In a report by leading user research and consulting group Nielson Norman Group, it is found that:
- Personalized, relevant, and timely emails are positively received and valued by recipients
- People consider marketing emails that are “random, impersonal, irrelevant, with too much promotional hype, or coming in high volume” to be spams
- The convenience and ease of unsubscribing, filtering, and ignoring emails make it difficult for companies ensure success of their brand newsletters
- Dark pattern of hiding unsubscribe process is not worth it for companies in the long term as it decreases users affinity to brands
MailChimp is an email-marketing giant that sends out billions of emails for companies everyday. Its research states that the average open rate for emails is 21.33% with an average click rate of 2.62%. Specifically speaking, E-commerce related emails have an average open rate of 15.68% with a click rate of 2.01%. This means that in every marketing campaign that brands send out to their customers, around 15% of their customers will open the email to take a look at its content, and only 2% of their customers will click inside the newsletters. These numbers reaffirm the finding that generic mass marketing emails rarely induce user actions.
Competitive/Comparative Analysis
To understand the current market, we compared different website features of various email management tools with Knowmea.
User Survey
Aligning with our research goals, we sent out a GoogleForm survey to our Slack group and several online shopping and marketing Facebook groups.
We broke our survey down to four sections: demographics, behaviours, motivations, and concerns/preferences. These different sections gave us a holistic view of our users.
Our findings include the following:
- Most people who receive promotion or brand emails would sometimes click on them (52.8%), but a lot of people almost never (39.6%)
- People open brand emails because they are mostly interested in their sales and promotions (77.4%)
- 92.5% of our respondents have unsubscribed from a brand email that they have signed up for, and the reasons they unsubscribe is because they are “annoying” “not useful” and “irrelevant”
User Interviews
To have a more in-depth look into our users, we conducted several rounds of interviews with our client’s contact list. We also sought out users that fall within the target market of Knowmea (20–35 years old online shoppers) and interviewed them. We asked questions that delved into the motivations behind our interviewees’ actions. Below are some of our interview quotes.
“I would actually like an app that just lets me put down brands to subscribe to, and just collect all the discounts that apply to me”
“More personalized newsletter, email inbox system so I can modify what brands I am subscribed to”
“Some way to fix clutter… a lot of them I don’t even care about”
“Too many emails and it’s not applicable to me”
Affinity Map
To make sense of our research, we created an affinity map to help direct our design. We copied down key insights from everything we have done so far onto post it notes, put them in a pile, and then grouped the different findings together to new categories. This turns our raw data into useful information for us.
Our affinity diagram gave us a consolidated understanding of our users and their needs, motivations, expectations, product features, and most importantly, pain points.
Persona
From our affinity diagram, we were able to synthesize our persona which will be the central user of our design. Meet Steph!
- Characteristics: Steph is an avid shopper that likes to know about sales. However, she is busy with work and life, so checking email is not really her priority
- Motivations: Steph likes to sift through emails quickly, and manage time efficiently
- Frustrations: it is very time-consuming for Steph to delete irrelevant and spams emails. She also finds it to be a tedious process when she needs to go to individual website links to unsubscribe.
- Goals : to have personalized newsletters with an easier way to manage her subscriptions
Planning
Methods: customer journey map, user scenario, feature prioritization, MVP, user flow, site map, card sort
Keeping Steph in mind, we began the planning process towards our design.
Customer Journey Map
We created a journey map that follows Steph in her experience with Knowmea. From Steph’s journey map, we were able to pin point our users’ thoughts and feelings during their interaction with Knowmea. We also uncovered opportunities to elevate their experience.
User Scenario: Steph is at work and speaks to her coworker about an upcoming Christmas work party. Steph wants to buy a new dress, and she goes through her emails to find sales and promotions that are happening. As Steph filters through her inbox, she becomes frustrated with all the irrelevant emails and spams. Steph’s coworker sees Steph struggling and suggests Knowmea. Steph goes online and takes a look.
Feature Prioritization and MVP
We ranked possible website features based on their necessities using the bucket method, and this created our minimum viable product/MVP.
Information Architecture and Card Sort
As we start planning our designs, we also noticed that the span of newsletters is very wide. There are many types of newsletters that range from company updates, product launches, sales and promotions, recommended readings, etc. After speaking with our client, we decided to focus our MVP on sales and promotion newsletters. To narrow down the categories that are in this type of newsletter, we conducted a card sorting exercises with some users.
Through this exercise, we learned what topics and categories were the most important to our users, which shaped our final designs.
User Flow and Site Map
We created an user flow that depicts how Steph will navigate Knowmea based on the website features.
To further organize the website flow, we created a site map that breaks down the website features into digestible pages for users.
Design
Low-Fidelity Pencil Prototypes
We started with lo-fi prototypes and then we broke it over and over again with user testing.
We experimented different ways to display information to users. Our goal was to find the most transparent and intuitive method for users.
- Gridbox layout: instead of endless listing of categories and options, our general layout was to use a gridbox system that allow users to pick and unpick the boxes.
- Long scrollable Home page: from our research we know users want to know more about Knowmea before using it. Users WILL read the product info, so there is no need to divide that up into separate pages. It was easier for users to get all the info they need before making a decision
- Side navigation bar: To allow users to still access the menu bar and CTA buttons at anytime during their reading, we made the decision to move our navigation bar to the side as opposed to the traditional top. As well, we wanted to mimick the email inbox folders and create familiarity as Steph uses Knowmea
We also created mobile version of our screens as it is a responsive website.
User Testing
We completed several rounds of user testing with our pencil prototypes. We asked users to complete tasks such as: complete onboarding process, remove a subscription, and change newsletter frequency. Some of our findings include:
- Unnecessary pages and frequency options
- Confusing wording and flow
- Lack of user control to select and filter
We made many changes after our testing. After many iterations, we moved on to medium-fidelity digital prototypes.
Medium-Fidelity Digital Prototypes
Conclusion
And there you have it! Three weeks of UX research, planning and design culminated into a working prototype that can help Steph find the perfect Christmas dress!
Reviewing the Challenge: What have I learned?
This has been a very interesting challenge as it was the first time I designed something that has a lot of potential, but just as much uncertainty. I learned how designs can shape the future of a product. In fact, UX research can influence the ultimate existence of certain products.
Future Considerations: What are the next steps?
As Knowmea is still in its introductory phase, we have recommendations for how the project can span out in the future.
- Coupon book format showing total deals found
- Newsletter format based on different frequency chosen
- Scale into international brands
- Exclusive brand news and promotion partnerships
A big thank you to our client Holden and my wonderful team members for helping me through this journey. I am very excited to see how Knowmea transforms our modern lifestyle!
