User Research, Information Architecture, UX/UI Design
Spoke is a social media advertising tool that lets real estate agents target their local audiences with effective campaigns. Spoke is a product of Rexlabs - the prop tech house I worked for as a product designer and research lead.
Email Notifications is a project we re-surfaced after identifying that a large number of our customers lacked visibility over their campaign performance and account activity. Because we realised that this impacted the value they perceived from the product and therewith their engagement and retention, we decided to re-prioritised this project.
Working alongside a BA, PM and three Devs I was the product designer and research lead on the project.
From prior research we knew that some of our customers would like to be more informed about what is happening in their account. To make sure this was not limited to only a small number of customers and to get a better understanding of what customers would like to be notified about we sent out a survey to our entire customer base.
The result was reaffirming. We received a large amount of responses, making up about 30% of our engaged customer base and a response higher than we've ever had before. A clear majority of 93% of all survey participants said they'd like to receive regular updates about their account activity.
In our survey we also asked our participants what exactly they'd like to be notified of. The categories were based on prior research and incoming feature requests. After reviewing the initial survey results we decided to also run user interviews to gather further requirements such as email notification frequency and the WHY behind certain notifications. This would allow us to build a holistic and informed solution.
After gathering all user requirements it was time to think about the information architecture of our email notifications. Rather than thinking of them as stand-alone and unconnected pieces of communication we decided to look at them as a holistic notification system.
This would for example prevent us from overloading our customers with too many email. We started mapping it out and prioritise them based on user preference and expected impact/implementation effort.
The Information Architecture of our Email Notification System
After mapping out the notification system I went on to sketch, design and prototype the different notification types. Below are a few examples.
The Weekly Account Overview Email
The 'Campaign has finished' Notification
I also designed a one-click unsubscribe experience (to be compliant with GDPR laws for our UK customers) that seeks customer feedback. This Unsubscribe version is our MVP and will be iterated on to be a fully fleshed out email notification center, in which users can select the types of notifications they'd like to receive as well as the cadence for their regular account updates etc.
The unsubscribe experience
After designing the different notification types we did lightweight user research by seeking feedback from prior research participants, with only minor changes resulting.
This project is ongoing and will be picked up by our team again in the new year. As our customer base grows the demand for this feature does too, so I am very excited for the project to come to fruition soon.