Outbound Email System

Problem
Sending a non-transactional outbound email to the Covenant Eyes customer base was a 13-step manual process and included many teams touching the email: Marketing, Development, QA, and Ops/DBAs. To significantly reduce the manual process, a Database Admin created an improved backend system. 
​
UX Design was needed to understand Marketing, Support, and Development needs and craft interaction and interface designs to improve accessibility and usability for the new outbound communication system.

​Success was measured by a completion of the project within a certain time period and included the creation of reference documentation for the system.

​My Role
I was the product designer on an agile development team. I coordinated user experience activities: requirement gathering, stakeholder interviews, user research, information architecture, user task flows, interaction, visual design, and prototyping. Tools: Confluence, Draw.io, and Sketch. 

UX Disciplines: User Research, Information Architecture, Information Design, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Writing for UX.
​Deliverables: Research documentation, App site-map, Workflows, Wireframes, Prototypes, and Final UI.  


Approach
The team observed Marketing, the primary client for the tool,  use the features made available through the DBA’s backend work. I diagrammed the system and noted problematic issues in yellow and red. Blue was used for system notes to DBA.

Based on the goals of users, I created a simplified and connected information architecture. Yellow indicates a needed change by DBAs. Blue was used for system notes to DBAs. Collaborating with DBAs was critical to the success of this project.

Revised IA for Mass Outbound Email tool

This is a draw.io diagram inside of Confluence. Collaborative tools like Confluence and project management tools like Jira gave everyone open access to all documentation with the ability to comment, ask questions, and provide clarity. ​

During the time period allotted for the work, the scope increased. Among other things, DBAs, Developers, and QA needed access to special tools and features. I explored solutions for these system users and used documentation methods meaningful to project leaders and implementers. ​

Example documentation from Confluence with a link to a Jira ticket.

​Results 
The outcome of this project was deemed a “Huge improvement” over the original manual process by leadership.
Feedback from users: 

• “Very easy to use.”
• “It’s hard to get lost.” (contextual meaning: the process is easy to understand and execute)
• “Pretty much impossible for me to break things.” (a regular problem in the original process)

Desktop Designs

Mobile Designs

Lessons Learned
The project started with both UX and Development working concurrently, without pre-development UX research or design. At times UI design was only one screen ahead of development.  Scope creep and time required to understand complexities between database and user actions almost eliminated user testing.

Solid communication, collaboration, trust, and grace between team members was critical to the success of this project. Use of a Design Component Library sped up both design and development.

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