UX Case Study

An Online Collaborative Workshop to Identify UX/UI Best Practices for Automated Email



Helping my UX/UI team learn about email best practices and product critique using Miro, a whiteboarding app for collaboration and workshops

The Problem

Most of the Fortune 500 firms are clients of our company and various systems exist to create and send automated email to these companies. These emails lack any standard styling and lack many of the current UX/UI best practices used by large companies for such communication. One first step toward improving our corporate email is to identify and learn from the best practices used by other companies.

The Solution

My primary goal was to create a simple workshop for our UX/UI team to have a collaborative session to examine an existing automated email. For the email example, I took screen shots from my phone from a marketing email I received from Chase Bank. In the workshop, participants would use online white boards with the screen shots as visuals to add their own sticky notes. These notes would highlight any best practices they identified and/or any UX/UI problems.

A secondary goal of the workshop was to teach critiquing and provide practice for critiquing existing products. Critiquing is a skill I noticed that our team needed to improve.

My Role

I designed and led the entire project. I set up 3 identical Miro board areas for the workshop. I broke the session into 3 separate segments, showing the top, middle, and bottom of the example email. Our team has 9 people, so team members were assigned to the 3 different boards. This approach supported collaboration because each 3 person team had their own board instead of all 9 sharing one. I also set up a system for collecting all of the notes, assigning them to categories, and creating a report for the team.

Outcomes

I am working with the team to schedule a time for us to do this workshop. One of the benefits of the workshop design, is that the framework can be used by teams to critique any software system or web app. It can be used to critique external products as shown in this particular example or for internal products such as web apps for ongoing product improvement.