Mailchimp

Problem

Mailchimp specializes in building software for small business owners to grow their business. A significant portion of Mailchimp’s customers are solopreneurs who have limited time to devote to marketing their business. User research found that many of these solopreneurs wish they could run more marketing campaigns using Mailchimp but they find it challenging to constantly be coming up with new ideas for marketing campaigns while they are focused on running their business.

Goal

The goal for this project was to encourage Mailchimp customers to try out the company's new products; such as Postcards, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads. By reducing the friction in the workflow creating marketing campaigns, it was proposed that this new solution would save time for customers and help Mailchimp see greater user retention on the platform.

Team & Role

At Mailchimp, I was a member of the Innovation Experiences Team. The team is responsible for prototyping future vision projects and testing them to determine whether they are worth pursuing on a larger scale.

Efforts towards this project were largely independent, where I took the lead on taking the idea from concept to completion while receiving feedback from colleagues on my team and relevant stakeholders. The team's consistent feedback throughout the design process was key to the success of this project.

Process

An iterative design process was followed consisting of a number of design methods. It began by defining the goals & anti-goals, success metrics, customer group of focus and, analysis of secondary research. Many stakeholders were interviewed with participants from a range of different teams and roles including product designers, researchers, developers, content strategists, and product managers all of which work on different parts of the product such as Growth, Email, Marketing, and Landing Pages. Key learnings from these stakeholder interviews and secondary research were consolidated through a thematic analysis. This led to a prompt for a design studio that involved eight product designers ideating different design directions. Sacrificial concept testing was then conducted based on learnings from the team design studio and tested with actual Mailchimp users. Finally, a number of prototypes were developed until a final proposed design was created after multiple design critiques.

Results

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