Client: Intuit / Mailchimp
Project
Mailchimp.com Analytics & Insights, Industry Benchmarks Analysis
Brief Summary
Mailchimp leadership wanted me to go wide on innovative thinking and new POC designs for the Insights & Analytics team across numerous new feature enhancements including: Industry Benchmarks, Pre-built Report Templates, Pendo Tutorial designs for Analytics & Insights section, and mobile breakpoints POVs for Analytics & Insights
Background
Conduct a discovery investigation and competitor analysis of industry benchmark features from similar email marketing platforms and competitors such as Klaviyo and others. Provide a report of findings and analyze our information architecture and create POC designs within the framework of Mailchimp.com and setup user interviews with UX Research team members to investigate the value of this feature and if users would like to have similar feature integrations for benchmarking in their email analytics dashboard.
Problem Statement
Many of our customers are leaving Mailchimp platform for other competitors like Klaviyo. Some of our competitors (e.g. Klaviyo) have successfully introduced a feature for their customers to see their analytics and metrics compared to similar companies of similar size and revenue in the email marketing space. We want to explore and find out of this type of feature would be considered useful to some of our most valuable Mailchimp customers and to regain the trust of our customers who have jumped ship for new features such as Industry Benchmarks.
My Role
Research, Competitor and Landscape Analysis, Feature workshop, User interviews, wireframes, and UI mocks (Concept hero mocks if industry benchmarks was integrated into Analytics & Insights section on mail chimp.com)
Team & Collaborators
Product Manager, Senior Design Team Members, Intuit Data Team, Development Team, Researchers
Target Users & Business Goals
Mailchimp customers who already had a significant number of email subscribers.
Find out if Industry Benchmarking would help them gain strategic insights in creating reports and generating email content based on industry competitors metrics.
Initial Challenges
The Industry Benchmarking is a complex concept and feature. The challenge in setting this up was 1) access to metrics that may be privileged with their competition and 2) Some Mailchimp customers had very niche, granular industries. One of the biggest challenges was understanding how to represent and parse industries, and sub-industries down to smaller niches where competition did not really exist for certain customers. Competitors for example had different definitions and parsing of industry. So to be precise in this regard proved to require a lot deeper research around the concept of benchmarking and categorization of industry and sub-industry. My team, however, appreciated my nuanced discoveries and complexity around this.
Research / Interview Insights
Our Mailchimp user interviews were successful. I shared some of the preliminary concepts for benchmarking to veteran users of Mailchimp and they were delighted and excited about the prospect of seeing comparisons with competitors to help them make more informed decisions about they email campaigns. They specifically liked some of the data visualization concepts I had designed to help them quickly, at a glance, determine an action for a campaign.
Design Activities and Process
Based on my thorough research and interviews into benchmarking space, I made several information architecture recommendations to the Analytics & Insights product teams and wider platform in my initial wireframes.
Additionally, I shared how this integration could impact other sections of the Mailchimp platform and the larger Intuit ecosystem as well and add a positive experience to users.
I created custom data visualization components, several UX/UI concepts and proposed enhancements, wireframes, high fidelity mocks and functional prototype user flows using Figma to demonstrate and test my hypotheses and to share with Mailchimp customers. Our user testing was positive and users unanimously found that the designs and industry benchmarking concept would be a valuable added feature to their dashboards, primarily how to stay competitive in their industry or direct business competitors.
Other discoveries during my design stage involved how this new feature might impact or add to current Analytics & Insights features as well. The users we interviewed were excited to see a benchmark concept integrated along existing features.
Below is the final mock for "Benchmarks" with the menu placement that was determined after talks with the Mailchimp IA team.
Benchmarking would also be an intergrated concept across Revenue, Email and SMS sections.
The team discovered that Industry Benchmarks was not an isolated concept, and comparing with competitors, it impacted several other features in the Mailchimp ecosystem.
Industry Benchmarks
I conducted multiple creative investigations and discovery activities as well as competitor research for "industry benchmarks" and an information architecture exploration. Based on my research and interviews I made Information architecture recommendations, created custom data visualization components, several UX/UI concepts and proposed enhancements, wireframes, high fidelity mocks and functional prototype user flows using Figma.
Responsive Mobile Breakpoints
Mailchimps Analytics & Insights section was not mobile responsive, to my surprise. The developers had been improvising the breakpoint! So as you can imagine, they were relieved when I was able to provide responsive mobile breakpoints of several screens as examples of how the team could think more mobile-first around their desktop features. I designed examples for them for both mobile and tablet.
The work was well received by Leadership and especially developers and was an exciting contribution knowing Mailchimp customers could utilize their .com app on their mobile devices. Incidentally we share mobile screens with users and they were thrilled and cited the difficulty on some sections of Mailchimp that weren't mobile friendly.
Pre-built Custom Report Templates for Customers
Additionally, another smaller project I helped the team with was creating multiple designs for "pre-built" custom reports and a report grid to allow users a simple and easy way to run email campaign reports. These templates would help new users to the platform who aren't yet familiar with setting up custom reports. Additionally, these templates could help more advanced users with quicker ways to generate popular report types, saving them time to spend on growing their business.
I met with other teams who were were already designing patterns for similar layouts and concepts for other sections of the Mailchimp platform. So when I shared these designs, the design ops leadership was pleased that I was being mindful of other work in flight to provide consistency.
One of the challenges and things I noticed at Mailchimp was that many teams were working in siloes and not aware of others work, so I made an effort to bring this up to UX management to get teams together to talk and share and identify gaps between emerging work and projects.
Pendo Tutorials
Pendo (pendo.io) is a third party tool that is integrated into the Mailchimp platform to introduce and provide brief tutorials to new and existing users to introduce brand new features. I learned about how to design specifically for Pendo implementations and I wrote a brief organizational/process manual to help other Mailchimp designers create Pendos for their own projects.
