Improving the Gifting Transactional Email Experience 

 July 14, 2019 - Nov 20, 2019 
Role: Product designer Tool: Sketch, Figma, Excel
1.0 Overview
Alyce is an AI-driven gifting platform solution that help companies create meaningful connections with their prospects, customers, and partners. In 2019, Alyce updated its brand and their current transactional email experience was outdated. 
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Transactional email plays a critical role because it occurs when clients send out gift/invitation to prospects/customers/partners for connection inquiry. Emails will be sent to Gift Recipients to allow them to accept gift and will also be sent to Gift Sender for them to follow up with meetings. 
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I was part of the Alyce product team and was assigned to improve the gifting transactional email experience.
Gift Recipient: Anyone receive a gift/invitation.
Gift Sender: Typical use case is a BDR sending the gift through Alyce to prospect.
1.1 The Problem
Alyce's current emails are massive and clients reported them to be confusing. Gift recipients who get the emails were also confused and sometimes reported the gifting emails as spam. So I listed out some of the goals of this redesigning process:
1. Update to suite the new brand
2. Reduce the amount to be succinct
3. Higher Gift Recipient’s interaction rate with emails
4. Create Email UI kit for future convenience
1.2 Kicking Off
I invited our product manager, head of product design and head of developer to have a kick off meeting. Our experience redesign process are broken down base to a design thinking process:
2.0 Research
To better understand what went wrong of the transactional emails, I  I set up multiple interviews with people from sales team and customer success team to get their insights and also problems that clients reported. 
User Exploration Script:
1.How many emails you usually go through a day?
2. What are the challenges you face with the email? Any pain points? Rank Them!
3. What do you think would be nice to include in the email but we don’t currently have?
4. What do you currently do to solve those pain points?

Exercise: 
showing all current gifting emails on board, allow interviewees to write down feedback about each email  on sticky notes.

2.1 Feedback
After I organized the feedback, I found out the problems of our current emails: 

The Pain points of the email experience:

• Too many Alyce’s transactional emails

• Too many Alyce’s transactional emails

So we reframe the Problem to… 
“How Might We make the email experience Clarify and valuable?“

Clarify

  • Can recipients know why are they receiving the email?
  • What the email wants the recipients/Senders to do?
  • Where the CTA lead the recipients/Senders to?

Valuable

  • Senders cannot recall the company and the person only by the first name. Give them more information about the case.
  • Can Clients customize the email to have their company branding?
  • Some of the emails are redundant. Keep the necessary one.

3.0 Design Iteration

After having the problem in mind, I invited other designers and our product manager to have a crazy 8’s section to brainstorming the possible content and wireframe of our emails. 

I draw a User journey map with user personas to better understand recipients’ emotion and thoughts throughout the journey. 

3.1 Wireframing

I held a design critique meeting for feedback on wireframes. I separated feedbacks into four categories: Likes, Ideas, Questions and Challenges.

Sender Email:

Likes
• show all gift info, if exchanged and for what (can beconversation started)
• more direct action

Ideas
• include recipient name on header
• If no meeting booked, include CTA to follow up
• Ability to view more gift
• Add a meeting reminder email

Questions
‍• How can we surface more research about the recipient?
• Are the social buttons neccessary?

Challenges
‍• Think about Bulk options. What ifsender send out multiple gifts?

Recipient Email:

Ideas
• Show how many more gifts recipient can choose from• move CTA higher
• Add CTA to quickly choose a gift

Likes
• Prefer options CTA to exchange or donate gift

Questions
• Should the gift be revealed fully in the email?
• What’s more important? Message or gift?
• Is it trust worthy?

Challenges
• Test if people are more willing to open anemail with a gift image vs. animated gif

4.0 Prototype

Through the wireframe, I make up prototype and do user testing. Contacted illustrator to do illustrations and content writer to write up email heading. Finally I built high-fidelity prototype using Sketch for development. The new transactional email experience helps enhance end-to-end experience and increase the users connection rate by 30%. 

Recipient Flow Updated:

1. Background that can be customize into each companies’ color
2. Animated illustration to bring up joy of revealing a gift. 
3. A handwritten font of note from the sender to add personalities to the email. Less spammy.
4. Sender information so recipients can directly know where this gift is formed. 
5. Add gift information, so recipients know what the gift is without having to click anything. 
6. Provide options to exchange or donate gift directly from the email. Lower the rate of recipient decline the gift. 
7. If recipient don’t want the gift, there is space for them to provide reasons, also help our clients to get info. 

Sender Flow Updated:

1. Compare to the more joyful recipient email, the sender email is more information based. And branded with Alyce. 
2. Add the recipients’ info to remind sender. Because sender may reach out to many prospects at once, so it is important to remind them which prospect is this. 
3. Provide meeting information to remind sender.
4. Allow sender to send conversation starter before meetings directly through email. 

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© 2022 KATHERINE DONG
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