Enhancing SendGrid Email Campaign User Experience

🗒️ Introduction

During my internship at SendGrid, I contributed to UI design, focusing on landing pages, product components, and creating user personas. My most significant project involved designing pre-made email templates for small business owners which proved as a challenging process due to technical constraints. Yet essential for the SendGrid product.

🔥 Problem Statement

The initiative at SendGrid aimed to create a collection of pre-made email templates, offering practical starting points for when the user started a new campaign. At the time, SendGrid would allow the user to upload their own fabricated templates, but would not offer any starter templates, like other competitors. The challenge was to balance visually appealing designs with email implementation, due to the constraints of HTML and inline styling.

📊 Research and Discovery

I had to learn more HTML at the time to understand what was possible and what was not visible, as well as the hoops and ropes of the SendGrid product, and engaged in secondary research to better comprehend the primary users of our product at that time. I also analyzed competitor’s offerings and how their email design was structured.

🎨 Design Process

Using the basic HTML structure, every email was designed with a Header, Body, and Footer. From there, I selected the top industries in our product at the time and designed 16 starter themes small business owners could use to start sending emails right out of the box. The HTML limitations made me focus on more simplistic and minimalistic designs that would be easier for the user to customize. A lot of my first sketches were more visually elaborated. However, I had to redesign a few due to limitations in its implementation.

🚀 Implementation