text messaging editor

SMS Marketing is a tool small business owners use to connect with their contacts on a more personal level, on the device they use the most...all from within their Constant Contact account.

company
Constant Contact
Year
2022

PROBLEM

Constant Contact's customers have requested the ability to text their contacts from within their account. Constant Contact decided SMS was a needed feature to compete in the digital marketing market.

SOLUTION

An easy-to-use text message marketing tool that allows users to design their message, select a contact list, and send/schedule their message at their preferred time. SMS reporting is available after sending.

TIMELINE

  • Overall: 1 year
  • Discovery & Research: 3 months
  • Design & testing: 9 months

PERSONA

Lisa is a 50-year-old owner of a small bookstore. She lives in a suburb of Boston and is always looking for ways to save time and attract more people to her book events. She is also hoping to expand her online presence to attract new contacts and grow online book sales.

How I addressed the persona in the design

  • Make it simple to adopt
  • Give her flexibility to build her SMS campaign in the order she wants (scheduling/content creation order reversible)
  • Show her how to grow her SMS list
  • Give her tools within SMS that make content generation fast

COMPETITOR RESEARCH

Since this was a new business venture for Constant Contact, a big part of my competitor research was understanding what the main features were across platforms. That research gave me the ability to help my product owner prioritize common features that I deemed necessary for an MVP.

EZTexting is a commonly used tool for small businesses. They prioritize allowing customers to attach various media to their texts.
Attentive gives users lots of guidance in their editor, like their templates and informational alerts underneath the text box.
SlickText deprioritizes the text message preview and focuses the user on entering their content.

After looking at various competitors, I determined that having a realistic preview of the text message was critical. Also allowing emojis and media was going to be important to stand on our own in the industry.

The necessary elements of a text messaging editor were the message box (complete with character count, which varies with the inclusion of emojis or special characters), the contact list picker, and the scheduler.

INITIAL EXPLORATIONS

Since I had the opportunity to design a new editing experience in our product, I was interested in trying our an asynchronous model, a different pattern from our other editors that forced users through a linear flow. While there is importance in sticking to patterns when designing, I felt it was an appropriate time to address customers feedback we've heard about our other editors, in that they aren't very flexible. Some users thinking about who they're sending to first, rather than the actual content of the marketing campaign. I wanted to explore a design that gave them more flexibility. My product owner was skeptical of this new approach, so in order to move forward, I needed to test which model was preferred by users.

I tested an accordion design which allows users to open and close various sections in whichever order they prefer.
I compared it to this model which has the user type their message first, and proceed to a scheduling screen (more similar to our email editor).

RESEARCH SUMMARY

  • There were no major problems identified for any of the three flows.
  • Participants found all three flows to be clear, easy to use, and intuitive.
  • When compared against each other, participants preferred the accordion design over the linear flow.

These results allowed me to pursue the new editor style.

FINAL EDITOR & KEY FEATURES

1. A message counter at the top. Tells users how many texts they've sent this month.
2. AI Content Generator. AI Content Generator for assistance creating a text fast. The decision was to use this tool over templates because it could factor in their industry and preferred writing tone.
3. Personalization dropdown. Allows customers to dynamically pull in their recipients first and last names. Personalized content helps our customers build trust with their audience.

4. Realistic preview. This was very common in competitor products and gives the user the ability to see how their will show to their recipients.
5. Recipient selector that calculates total texts to send. Since the character count per text is small, it's common for users to send 2+ texts to each recipients. This counter helps them keep track of how many messages they'll actually be sending.
6. Send now to schedule for later. Allows users to choose when exactly they want to send their message. Protection against sending during quiet hours is built in to our product.

PROJECT RESULTS

$4.1M/52% YoY growth
2.1M texts sent
$10k net monthly invoice growth
17k paying customers

IDEAS FOR THE FUTURE

-Make the editor feel more like an actual phone. Give users the familiarity of something they use every day.
-Add MMS capability (sending images)
-Add a better link adding experience

Prototype link

LEARNINGS

Working on a rushed, highly prioritized project is hard. It often involves sacrificing user experience for product deliverables, which is a designer's nightmare. But, I learned a lot about advocating for user needs, leveraging user testing to prove design hypotheses, communicating constantly with engineers, QAing dev work, and keeping a backlog of UI improvements for post-MVP/V1/V2. I'm grateful for the opportunity I had to work on such an important company initiative.