Incentives in Messages

Goals, Constraints and Scoping

This project came about quickly and somewhat unexpectedly. At the beginning of Q1, “Coupons in Messages” was identified as a high priority project that would be released iteratively and involve several teams, namely Journeys (triggered messages), Campaigns (one-time messages), Incentives, and several engineering infrastructure teams.

Although phase one of this project was initially scoped to exclude any new design work, as the Journeys engineering term began technical discovery, they identified a last minute requirement to design a new component for users to be able to create coupons within the flow of composing a message. This condensed a project I initially had targeted as a large, end of year goal into a one month stretch, so it was extremely important to identify clear user and business goals, as well as negotiate with product and engineering what steps of the design process were vital to this project’s success.

Project goals:

• Provide users with an easy, intuitive way to create a new coupon “on-the-fly” while they are composing a journey message

• Keep the experience as similar as possible to the current experience within the Coupons tab

Design Iterations and Feedback

With the tight timeline set for this project, I wanted to ensure I would be able to fit in as much user testing as possible. To achieve this, I worked very quickly through some lo-fi sketches to illustrate my ideas to help align the project team. Once I had buy in from all stakeholders, I jumped into high fidelity mockups exploring options for more complex parts of the create coupon flow.

Coupon type selector

File validation

User Testing

Conducting usability testing of this new feature was extremely important to me as it would be released directly to clients as a new self-service offering that the majority of users had no prior experience with. Working under a set of tight time and resource constraints meant that I had to be smart about setting up testing. I developed a research plan in parallel with hi-fi designs and recruited a broad set of clients to test the feature before handing it off to engineers.

Key Takeaways

• Overall clients felt it was easy to create new coupons in this component and that it fit in well with the rest of the Journeys flow

• Most participants expressed some confusion about how to navigate out of the nested drawer

• Most participants suggested that we could make the experience getting into/out of the coupon component more seamless

Based on the overwhelmingly positive responses from testing, I felt comfortable moving forward with releasing this feature after making some small tweaks. There were several points of feedback that surfaced during user testing, some of which addressed the component I designed, and some of which addressed other aspects of the experience owned by the Journeys team. I worked with the journeys team to get updates into their roadmap, and made the following changes to my create coupon component:

Final Designs

We launched the initial release of this feature with the designs below that achieved our goals of keeping the experience as close as possible to the current flow for creating coupons in the Coupons tab, while incorporating updates to the UI based on user feedback to optimize for the specific experience of creating a coupon within the Journeys flow.

This launch was conditional on planning follow up iterations to address tech and design debt we incurred, namely around merging this experience with the in-tab creation experience into a single component for easier maintenance, making design improvements to pain points that were surfaced during user testing, and reviewing some quick UI choices that were made prior to my joining the project to ensure they were scalable for future releases.

Impact

We launched this feature in spring of 2021 to an initial beta group and then rolled it out to all clients. It received extremely positive feedback and was quickly adopted by users. In our post-launch metrics review, we found that this feature increased message conversion by 60% and revenue per send by 28%, making it one of the most impactful projects the company launched in H1.