Mission Statement

Emarsys got appraised as the leader in personalization engines. They provide an end to end marketing solution for B2C companies, covering the whole customer journey. However, their mobile oriented channels struggled to keep up with the quality level of the rest of the product. I joined the company as part of a new innitiative to bring the user experience up to speed (and beyond).

Challenges

Stuck in the present

Our work was mostly based on a pure demand basis. Product plans were sometimes changing on a daily basis. Both of these things made it very difficult to contribute proactively to the product vision and UX culture itself.

Many voices

We were responsible for 9 (later 11) teams. It proved to be a very challenging task to consider every single one of these voices into our design process, especially whenever time was of essence.

No borders

The responsibility of our UX team had no clear boundaries. Many of the departments had overlaps with product areas which other UX teams were responsible for.

Stranded remotely

We were the only UX team was based in Vienna, with all the other teams working from the Budapest office. This meant much of the culture and decision making was done out of our reach.

Strategy

Channel the energy

Having all those active voices provided a huge untapped potential to gather many ideas and even more feedback. If we took the innitiative, we could transform all of those voices into a rich source of inspiration.

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Make some noise

In order to be involved more actively into the whole UX culture, we had to impress the other teams with our results. We made sure to take every opportunty to make some strong impression.

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Close the gap

Being fractioned both in location and responsibilties, we had to find alternative ways to achieve coherence and unity. Remote or On-Site, communication was key to our success.

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Channel the energy

Brainstorm for the best compromise

Time was often very limited and designing the best solution was a matter of choosing the best compromise. We utilised brainstorming sessions to explore the solution space and achieve the best compromise. One such session provided the basis for our calendar view, which helped us to find a solution we could implement within one day.

Collect all ideas

We made sure to involve all the critical stakeholders. This made sure that all relevant viewpoints influenced the design early on in the iteration phase and no time was wasted later on .

Make some noise

Participate and help

We took every opportunity to support coworkers, whether it was consulting a product manager on a side project or joining a research guild. This helped us to increase our visibility dramatically. Eventually, our Budapest teams invited our team in Vienna to shape the design culture together

Do the right thing

There are times were even the best compromise is just not good enough. In this particular example, we were asked to extend the campaign templates with different substates.

However, the selection step already covered editing, so the introduction of substeps would have broken the the users mental model. We fixed this issue by introducing a new edit step, which made it coherent with the other areas and allowed us to introduce the concept of substeps.

Prepare for the future

In some cases our design iterations were already so close to a final solution, that we would spend some extra time and provide our stakeholders with a long term proposal. In the case of deliverability reporting, the initial task was to provide an upselling opportunity for our partners.

Due to development constraints, we had to leave the deliverabilty metrics untouched. However, in our proposal for the future we reframed those metrics in an effort to both increase transparency and provide context for the value proposition of our partner.

Close the gap

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Coherence is no luxury

Sometimes a feature would be designed in parallel by different UX teams for different product areas. Close collaboration is essential in such cases, but since those teams were in another location, this proved to be very tricky. Moreover, we were in the transition period between two design systems, which lead to lot of incoherency in the design language itself. We made sure to take the extra time necessary to fix those coherency issues.

Unite the areas

Each of our product areas served their own purpose, but they were rarely connected with each other. A push campaign for example can be influenced by a In-App campaign, but the reporting lacked metrics to understand this dependency. We introduced a new section exposing exactly that relationship, bringing those two product areas closer together.

Remote UX design

The majority of our development was located in different countries, making it difficult to sense a feeling of unity. Our remote workshops didn't resonate well on an emotional level. We identified this problem and used technologies like Miro to replicate the feeling of On-Site workshops, while using the platforms own strengths to create something special, standing its own ground. People loved it.

Everyone on the same page

We put a lot of effort into aligning everyone on one common product vision, facilitating workshops with a broad audience. We also made sure to share the outcome of these workshops in the form of various design artefacts. In the case of our push journey map, one can see the enormous amount of diverging views, despite the limited scope of the journey itself.

The result

A new era of remote

Our efforts in improving the remote culture paid off. Teams from other offices started reaching out to us, asking whether they could use our remote workshops as a reference. It was a huge joy to see people appreciate our efforts, bringing us all one step closer together, especially during the complicated times of the Covid-19 virus.

On the same page

We started off with many distinct voices. Channeling all off these voices into our designs sometimes literally meant to bring them all onto the same page, as was the case with the design critique to the left.

On the other hand, we also learned to improve our voices. Our prototypes became more elaborate and featured more accessible navigation structures.

Shaping the future

Our efforts left a lasting impression on our stakeholders. Product managment did their best to involve us earlier in the feature cycle, giving us more time to prepare.

We also gained more visibility amongst the other UX teams, which allowed us to contribute to both culture and design language. A component proposed during the SMS Topup design critique was received so well, that another team asked when they could start using it in their designs.

During my time as a product manager at Emarsys, Michal was one of the people I felt comfortable with from the very beginning. I was not ashamed to bring him half assed ideas because I knew he would not send me away. He would rather instead help to bring them further. I still remember enjoying that!

Ondrej Mayer
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No need to be! I got all the resources to make your project just as awesome and beyond! How about we have a short talk and exchange about your requirements?

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Maturity Check

9 points required to pass

How can design boost your revenue? (7 pts)

0 pts

It can stop pesky customer support requests

It can change my users personal preferences

It can be the USP of my services

It can reduce the development effort

It can facilitate buy-in of political stakeholders

It can exploit addictive patterns of humans

It can help promise features that don't yet exist

It can boost retention and customer loyalty

It can attract better talent into my company

It can maximise the turnaround of key journeys

It can save the lifes of my customers

It can make me avoid compliance violations

It can improve my conversion during onboarding

It can reduce operational costs

What makes great designs stand out? (4 pts)

0 pts

Can an Ai create great designs? (4 pts)

0 pts