Allison Walker | Email Campaign Builder Redesign

Problem

The existing email product created barriers for customers in creating high-quality campaigns.

It incorporated selecting a mailing list within the design workflow, making the overall task cognitively taxing and cumbersome.
It also used indirect selection to create the design, so it was less intuitive than competitors.

Updating the design would improve: how customers targeted, connected and engaged with their audiences; and the overall competitiveness of the product in the market.

Approach

To start, I researched competitors to identify design and functional patterns from competitors.

Products that included purchasing or uploading an email list as part of the workflow were ideal to review. Examples like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Moo Cards, etc.

The design priorities for the redesign included:

Simplified Workflow: All of the design activities would be grouped together; selecting a mailing list would occur separately.
WYSIWYG Editor: Rebuild the framework of the email builder to rely on affordance and direct selection.

Outcome

The redesigned Email Campaign Builder shipped for both InfoUSA and Salesgenie customers.

The simplified workflow and WYSIWYG approach improved how customers targeted, connected, and engaged with their audiences — and strengthened the product's competitiveness in the market.

Design Solution

The redesign focused on five core areas that improved the user experience: a template gallery to help customers start quickly, drag-and-drop layout widgets for rapid layout decisions, coordinated color themes to guide design choices, a content editor for entering messaging, and error states to catch common mistakes.

Template Gallery

A new requirement was a template gallery that provided a curated selection of layouts and styles, organized by message type or industry. This helped customers quickly find a starting point rather than building from blank canvas.

Wireframe: Select Industry

View Selected Layout

Explore other layouts

Preview alternate layout

Switch Layout

Switch layout confirmation

Drag and Drop Layout

Widgets of mini design layouts help customers quickly realize the layout of their campaigns. This direct manipulation approach replaced the indirect selection model and made the builder more intuitive.

Wireframes demonstrating the sequence of drag and drop:

Coordinating Color Theme

Helps customers make better design decisions by using pre-selected groupings of coordinated colors. This removed the burden of color selection from non-designers while maintaining flexibility.

Wireframes of a user selecting coordinating colors:

Wireframe of user selecting a group of colors

Content Editor

This step is where customers entered their business details and marketing message. There was debate on whether an affirmative save between each change was necessary, but ultimately we decided on auto-save (against) in order to focus on making the editing feel fun, fast, and easy.

Wireframe: User clicks title to update or change font

Wireframe: Updating a link with URL or email

Error States

Part of helping non-designer customers make good design choices was catching simple errors early. Error messages guided users toward better decisions without blocking their workflow.

Missing images

Error check

Adding a valid URL to link

Double-check for errors

Related Work

This email builder project established a foundation for other SaaS products at Infogroup. I went on to design the Salesgenie Lead Manager, Salesgenie Dialer, Salesgenie/InfoUSA Customer Data, and Salesgenie Lead Generation Team Edition.

Email Marketing Tool Upgrade

Redesigning an email marketing tool to streamline how businesses build, segment, and send campaigns.