As the product designer I conducted user interviews, analyzed data, user testing, and used design strategy to create a streamlined process for internal communicators to send emails on behalf of departments and executives in their organization. This led to a decrease in workflow interactions by almost 30% and enabled users to access relevant email analytics.
Staffbase email is an all-in-one internal email campaign tool empowering communicators to craft, send, and track performance to drive engagement. However, complex workflows and fragmented analytics significantly diminish team productivity and obscure insights into campaign effectiveness. These issues directly undermine the ability of internal teams to deliver timely, impactful messages and measure their success accurately.
To understand the key pain points our users experienced, I conducted user interviews, revisited previous research findings, and analyzed insights from our customer feedback portal.
Single email per user account: Users can't send from multiple addresses, each email address must have its own account created.
Restricted collaboration: Resources (drafts, templates, recipient lists, etc.) can only be shared to groups but each user can only be part of one group.
Rigid permissions: Analytics are only visible to the account/email it was sent from.
Send internal updates from different departments and executives.
Edit content and collaborate with his communications team.
Measure the reach and impact of emails.
Logging into another account when sending from a different email address.
Sharing send responsibilities with other members of communications team.
Limited visibility into email performance across his team.
Before (partial snapshot of userflow):
To send an email from a specific address, users need to navigate to the Team page and log in as that "user" if their account allows for that, if not then they'll need to log out of their account and manually log in with the credentials of that user.
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After (full userflow):
The process of navigating to the Team page is removed, the internal communicator will select the alias (sender email address) directly on the Email Preview/Send page instead.
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While the current end-to-end email creation and sending process is user-friendly, collaboration around workflows such as accessing drafts, recipient lists, or sending from different email addresses can become complex. To address this, backend work was necessary to redesign how data is stored, retrieved, and managed.
Simplify the experience of sending emails from different addresses by creating a new database for aliases that can be shared with the right users.
Expand access to email metrics to relevant users by leveraging existing user role permission hierarchy and sharing frameworks.
New alias entity created in our system:
New page and process to create and display Alias as it is now a separate entity from "users".
Error handling:
Alias email addresses need to be unique to uphold send regulations and for accurate tracking metrics.
Organizations can now manage who can send from what email address:
Admin users can grant access to an alias for an individual or a group of users.
Overview of analytics now has a filter to select which aliases to include in charts.
Previously, only certain user roles could view individual email analytics by logging into specific user accounts through the Teams page. Now, any user can access and filter email performance data for the email aliases they have permission to use, without needing to log into different accounts.
I conducted usability testing with 16 participants who interacted with a high-fidelity prototype in Figma to evaluate their experience and the usability of the new email alias feature.
Ease of finding the new email alias page.
Ease of managing other user's access to email aliases as an Admin user.
User comprehension of the new email card designs.
Locate the Email Alias page.
Create a new alias and share access to it with specified users/group.
Change a user's access to an alias.
Answer questions using the new email card.
56% of all participants found the new email alias page on their first try.
100% of enterprise customers found the new email alias page on their first try.
100% of participants successfully shared and unshared to those listed in the task.
94% of participants answered correctly on all questions related to the new email card design.
Launched in May 2023 to a beta group consisting of customers who opted in as well as those who were part of the user interviews and testing groups. Before the general release we added a banner to accounts with a specific set of send method configuration (affected 1 of the beta customers and less than 10% of existing customers).
Launched in August 2023, the email alias feature aimed to reduce support requests and increase direct platform usage (some used third party extensions or add-ins). This new feature streamlines internal communication workflows, empowering users to manage and utilize email aliases effectively. Workflow interactions decreased by almost 30%, this feature was essential in reducing churn, especially for enterprise customers.