Secure Marketing Message App
Overview
Small-business community required a secure 1-way marketing communication tool that allowed community leaders to inform the community of information in a more real-time and secure manner than email.
My contribution
UX Design Lead Product Strategist
The team
1x UX/UI Designer 1x Business Analyst
Year
2019
The tools
Sketch + Invision JIRA MS Powerpoint GoToMeeting
The activities
Ideation workshops Industry research User interviews Usability testing User flow design High-fidelity designs Build Prototypes Agile User Stories and BDD Product refinement meetings
Challenge
A global community of small-business owners and their supporting organisations required a highly secure method to send confidential communications in real-time and in a secure manner.
Various levels of organisers within the community needed the right access permissions to be able to send communications to their localities, countries, and regions. Communications needed to be real-time with the ability for highly urgent messages to alert the community to important matters (for instance, impending Covid Lockdowns).
The initial requirements required that senders be able to send messages via a mobile-first SaaS solution, with the small business owners receiving messages on a dedicated android app.
The solution needed to have the standard features expected in an email marketing solution: previewing messages, saving draft, scheduled sending, delivery and view insights for sent messages, ability to enrich messages with image headers, attachments and links, and the advanced ability to retract messages or update messages.
Approach
Iterating an MVP
A basic working prototype of the solution was built to showcase the concept. That solution was re-designed and then iterated upon a number of times.
Each iteration involved discussion of requirements with business leaders and input from the community users and stakeholders and involved research, high-level design stories, user research, high-fidelity designs, design prototypes, informal usability testing, and user stories and acceptance criteria, as well product grooming workshops to assess technical feasibility.
Iterations
- Advanced groups, user roles and permissions
- Visual redesign of the interface based on a new design system
- New message create wizard
- Preview of messages
- Delivery reports and message tracking for insights
- Editing Updating and Retracting sent messages
- Message scheduling
- All pages made mobile-first and components made responsive and adaptive.
- Ability to send messages to channels or groups
- Ability to send emails to users who did not have the app.
Outcome
The solution was an advanced marketing and communication tool that allowed the leaders to send real-time messages using a mobile-first web app to small business owners around the globe.
Senders could preview messages, add image headers, links and file attachments to the messages, and select recipients by geography or group membership. Draft messages are auto-saved to improve the user experience.
Unlike marketing emails, senders had the ability to edit or retract sent messages. The solution had advanced delivery report information so senders could see who had received and/or read the messages. Senders had the ability to do advanced message scheduling based on a recipient’s timezone.
Urgent messages could be sent so that Android app users would be alerted in real-time to important information (e.g. Impending Covid-19 lockdowns).
The mobile app had an onboarding flow that introduced small business owners to the messaging app.
To help migrate from existing email marketing, the solution had the ability to allow messages to be sent to users through email who had yet migrated to the mobile app.
To comply with international privacy and spam legislation, end-users could manage their message permissions through a web-based privacy permission portal or directly through the mobile app.
The front-end of the web app solution was built on standardized design patterns and an Angular 6 design system component library that began to accelerate delivery for additional features like polling and email groups.