GUIDEcx Email Redesign
Unifying the GUIDEcx brand and elevating the user’s experience
The Problem
GUIDEcx providers and customers were submitting feedback about a pretty extreme pain point - our emails. We were receiving insights that emails being sent out of GUIDEcx were unpolished, inconsistent, not mobile responsive, and overloaded with unnecessary information. Our emails hadn’t been updated for several years, didn’t follow any single design system, and weren’t reflecting our current brand - ultimately giving us an outdated feeling. Additionally, our notification service was also being neglected - leading to a lack of visibility into when an email was sent out, and a lack of trust on if it had actually been sent on time if at all. This overall resulted in a poor experience for users that engaged with GUIDEcx emails, especially on their phones.
From a survey sent to 20 GUIDEcx providers, 60% of them said they received complaints from their customers about the lack of usability within emails. It was clear our email notification service and UI was due for a huge overhaul and redesign.
The Opportunity
How might we provide an engaging experience across the entire lifecycle of a GUIDEcx user, whether they are a customer or provider? When users (especially customers) are more engaged with the product, projects go more smoothly, and providers are more likely to retain.
Overview emails sent to project managers, task assignees, watchers, and several other user types once a week. We were receiving feedback that these overviews were useless, and there was cognitive overload when viewing the email.
Task emails would be sent out upon assignment, and continuous reminder emails would be released on a regular cadence. Assignees could mark the task as done, working on it, or stuck via email without having to enter the GUIDEcx application.
@ mentions and notes - it was difficult to determine who left the note, and the links were often broken. Recipients also missed the “reply directly by email” button and consistently requested to add that feature in, even though it was already there.
Understanding the root of the problem
This project was born out of the identification of an additional pain point - the lack of email customization options in general. Providers were already struggling with our inconsistent emails and notifications, and were feeling frustrations at their inability to make any changes to the emails - there was 0 ability to white label, no control over when the email was sent, and to who. As a product team overseeing communication, we understood that the main problem was the lack of control. Our first step in the right direction logically was to update our emails, so at least in the interim while we figured out a larger solution, we could ease that pain. Once our emails had a good base, it would be easier to customize off of a unified system rather than the jumbled experience and brand we had now.
The first step to email customization is aligning all 40+ GUIDEcx emails on one system
Our emails lacked consistency - we had dozens of emails, and none of them looked the same or used the same shared components. They were all hard coded with no mobile responsiveness. Footers were on a few of our emails, but there was still a distinct lack of branding and confusion on where the email was coming from and why.
We have designed a new set of templatized emails in Sendgrid to pull from. These templates feature refreshed UI modeled after timber components, updated copy in subject lines and email body, consistent footers in all emails, and mobile responsiveness. As these email replace the current emails, we are raising the bar to a higher standard of quality whose impact will be felt by all that experience GUIDEcx through email engagement.
Overview emails sent to project managers, task assignees, watchers, and several other user types once a week. We were receiving feedback that these overviews were useless, and there was cognitive overload when viewing the email.
Task emails would be sent out upon assignment, and continuous reminder emails would be released on a regular cadence. Assignees could mark the task as done, working on it, or stuck via email without having to enter the GUIDEcx application.
@ mentions and notes - it was difficult to determine who left the note, and the links were often broken. Recipients also missed the “reply directly by email” button and consistently requested to add that feature in, even though it was already there.
Release of Compass
Compass V1 was released in July 2022 following a long bake period and extensive QA and engineering testing. Since then, we have iterated several times and updated Compass with new features such as the ability for customers to add other users to a project and reassign tasks if needed.
Compass - high fidelity wireframes in production
High fidelity designs currently being used in Compass. The task cards are relevant to the user and their current in-flight projects.
Users land on the today page and are given a quick snapshot into project health (on-time, early, etc), the tasks they have due, and the status of in progress tasks. Compass users can communicate with their points of contacts through several areas of the application and complete important steps with just a few simple clicks.
Clicking on a task card opens the task modal and expands the task details. Within the modal, a Compass user can add notes, reassign tasks, upload attachments, and more. They can also move the status of a task along without opening the task modal.
Results and Takeaways
Compass V1 was released in July 2022 following a long bake period and extensive QA and engineering testing. Since then, we have iterated several times and updated Compass with new features such as the ability for customers to add other users to a project and reassign tasks if needed. With the release of Compass and a push for inviting customers to GUIDEcx, we have seen a significant increase in customer engagement in general, but especially those who use Compass.
Compass customer engagement (updating task statuses, uploading attachments, adding task notes, etc) is 33% higher than customers who continue to use the GUIDEcx legacy application built for our providers. We have also seen a significant decrease in negative feedback around the customer experience, and have found that projects where 3 to 5 customers are added to a project have a 91% on-time completion rate.
Additionally, we have received positive feedback in the way of helping our customers work better together.
Overall, the initial release of Compass plus additional enhancements have saved our providers time and increased the pleasurability of interacting with their customers and completing projects. This is just the beginning of the customer team’s ongoing efforts to continue to enhance and delight our users as we strive to build the best onboarding and implementation software in the game.
Want to learn more about recent work at GuideCX?
Reach out to me at noa.michelle.tamir@gmail.com to set up a call!