List Management and Segments
The purpose of segments
As an email delivery and marketing platform providing tools to help mage recipients and contacts is crucial to email performance. inbox providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc… track opens, clicks, and overall engagement. This tracking system can effect the reputation of senders (SocketLabs Customers) to be determined as spammers or legit senders. To ensure recipients receive and engage with emails, the content must be relevant. One personalization technique is segmenting lists. Segments parse lists based on a set of conditions such as age, location, gender, etc. It depends on the industry and nature of the business but it allows customers to maintain a good reputation and reduce wasted email delivery.
Socketlabs decided to provide tools for their customer base to segment and pare out recipient lists to better target their emails based on relevancy.
Who am I designing for
I worked with support and sales to discover our target customers.
We distilled our customer base down to Owners, Marketers, IT personnel. Marketers and Owners are interested in sending more curated content to their downstream customers.
Industry Within the industry
Segmentation is nothing new.
I took a look at the different segmenting tools by competitors to see how we could position the product.
What makes up an email recipient
In order to parse out a segmented list, I had to understand what makes up a recipient.
Required fields are attributes that are required in order to add a contact to the system.
Custom Fields are additional attributes to further describe the recipient.
by understanding these parts we can start to segment out specific genders and locations etc. to send email.
The pieces of list segmentation and how they fit together.
Before sketching UI elements, I conceptualized the abstract parts and how they fit together.
This was a true exercise in information design and architecture.
Here, conditions filter out types of recipients from a larger list to create a new ‘segmented list’.
I had to address how uploading a new list impacts this new design.
Behaviors and solutions surrounding list segmentation
To help map out the MVP, I place the user steps in blue and the features that go along with each step that may make the product.
The major steps include selecting a list and adding conditions that pars out a segment.
User Flow
Making a user flow helped me to identify the different phases of creating a segment
the different phases help me to design for different behaviors.
Picking list
I created something called “All Recipients” which users can segment from.
Users can segment from other segmented list as well.
Creating Conditions
Users think about attributes such as gender, name, date added
other attributes they can create such as birthday, age, occupation
Previewing the segmented list
Users need to view the segments before they finally save it.
Saving
Users can save the segmented list and send to those recipients upon email delivery
I sketched out the likely path users will take to segment a list. from selecting lists, creating conditions, and previewing the segment.
I designed a number of components to assist users in creating segmented lists.
Adding conditions
I designed a condition strip for users to apply the parameters to parse out the type of recipients they wanted.
I designed it vertically for scanability so it could read more like a sentence than just an applied criteria.
Stacking Conditions
Stacking conditions help the user to enter very specific criteria for the list they are looking to segment.
Elipses and readability
Conditions are stacked in a way that is readable for users to scan and edit according to the type of segment they were trying to parse.
Recipient Multiple Lists
When creating a segment list, one recipient can appear in multiple lists, I designed an editing modal that allows the user to see how many lists one recipient belonged to.
Views Headers
Horizontal scrolling allows the user to see the custom field headers to better asses what type of segment they want to create.
Removing vs Deleting Recipients
I established the difference between removing and deleting a recipient from the segment. Deleting meant the recipient was deleted entirely from the management system. while remove meant only remove from that list but will be accesable through the ‘All Recipients’ area.
Exclude, Include
The power of segments all comes together at sending time. users can exclude a segmented list when the content is not relevant and vice versa.
Interesting challenges:
I realized we needed 2 types of lists while designing that handle different user needs.
Dynamic
When new recipients are added a the the system checks the criteria and ads them to a segmented dynamic list if it fits.
Static lists
The static list only shows segmented recipients created at that point in time with no updates upon further uploads.