Summary

I worked with BevSuite to design an email marketing platform from the ground up. Our users were small beer, wine, and spirits merchants. We interviewed merchants to learn about their needs, prioritized some key requirements for an MVP, and designed v1 for testing.

v1 of the product was a desktop app because we learned that merchants do the majority of their online work on laptop or desktop computers. The Initial flow takes the merchant through sign up and creation of their first email campaign, which they can choose to send or save.

One of my favorite aspects of this product was the focus on harnessing open source information as well as AI to help merchants spin up content for their emails. Through various APIs, we provided merchants with the following automated content to make their lives easier:

• • AI-generated subject line ideas
• • Subject line ranking score to let users know how their subject line would likely perform, and notes to let them know how they might improve upon it
• • Automatically populated names, images, abv information, and maker notes sourced from a large product database
• • Connection to Mailchimp for easy customer data import

The largest success metric for the company was the number of emails sent, so my goal when designing the user flow was to encourage the merchants to create emails.

In the video above, you can see our initial MVP, which guides the user through a simple 4-step process to create an email campaign.

Beyond the MVP

This was a very fast-paced company, so we accomplished a lot in just 3 months! Here are some highlights.

Working with the product team, I created a design library with branded components to be used throughout the flows.

In addition to the initial Create an Email Campaign flow, I designed the following aspects of the platform:

• • Campaigns: a page to house and manage all sent, drafted, and scheduled emails
• • Customers: a page to add and manage all customers in the merchant's contact list
• • Customer Lists & Segments: a method for merchants to separate their customers into lists manually or based on certain automated criteria
• • Account Settings: an admin area that controls settings like merchant name, password, billing, business info, and footer design

Multiple Product Functionality

The initial MVP was designed only for emails that feature one product, but we heard early on from merchant feedback that an email containing information about multiple products would be much more useful. We also got feedback that the Edit Content page (where the merchant can see their email and play around with the content blocks on the page before sending it) was a bit cumbersome, especially given the low technical experience that a lot of merchants had. They wanted to be able to directly move components around on the page, much like you would do while scrapbooking or manipulating a piece of paper in the real world.

Of course, this is easier said than done, as the way a layout is built on the computer has some limitations that a real-world paper project may not. For example, the layout is built upon a grid system and content must be placed within predefined grid sections. I brainstormed how we might teach this concept to the user while making the editing experience as simple and straightforward as possible.

The following is one idea I came up with to improve upon the Edit Content experience. In this flow, the merchant can drag and drop layouts onto the page and they will snap into an area. Once a layout is in place, the user can then drag a content section into it, and proceed to edit that content section.

1. Drag layout space onto page 2. Drag content section into layout space 3. Find product and choose content to show

Results

We ended up implementing an even simpler design for the multi-product use case. You can see the current product at app.bevsuite.com!