Automated Push Notifications

Message Flows provides automated push notification sequences that allow merchants to engage with consumers in personalized, context-relevant ways.

My role

I led the design of end-to-end experience with processes starting from user journey mapping, to creating an entirely new framework, to working with engineers to polish to the final product.

Team

1 Product designer,
1 Product manager,
1 Program manager,
2 User research,
6 Engineers

Company

Tapcart

Timeline

Mar 2021–Jun 2021
(4 months)

Background

Retaining a strong customer base is one of the top factors into establishing a successful ecommerce business. In order to capture their audience, merchants commonly use marketing automation services.

The problem

Merchants were frustrated on the limited capabilities inside the push notifications center

Merchants saw a clear value in sending push notifications as it increased overall consumer engagement. However, research informed us that there were a few underlying problems that often led to their dissatisfaction with the product such as:

  1. The process to send push notifications was laborious and manual for merchants
  2. Merchants could only send push notifications to their entire customer base with the same messaging
Push Notification feature

The solution

Enable merchants to send automated messages towards specific groups of customers based on events

We built an MVP version of push notifications automation with a suite of prebuilt templates. Through this, we aimed to increase merchant ROI and engagement with dashboard.

The approach

Identifying steps needed to create automated system

First, we identified three steps that are needed to create fully automated system for push notifications.

  1. Trigger step: predetermined events that trigger specific groups of customers to subscribe
  2. Wait step: time to be delayed before the push notification is sent out
  3. Push notification step: compose messages for their push notification

Then, we built features based on insights gathered from user research conducted prior to the project.

Adding filters to target different consumer groups

Merchants wanted to be able to segment their push notifications so that they can target specific consumers and diversify strategies. So, we enabled merchants to use a wide array of filters such as user groups or events inside trigger step.

Trigger step – adding filters

Personalized and context relevant push notifications to better engage with consumers

Merchants wanted to be able to send personalized push notifications to better engage with their consumers. So, we worked towards enabling merchants to insert ‘variables’ inside push notification step. We used fallback as a solution to prevent merchants from sending glitchy push notifications caused by technical errors.

Push notification step – adding variables

Deeplink to improve the consumer app experience

Merchants wanted their push notifications to be contextually relevant on a functional level so that they can enhance customer experience and increase conversion rate. So, we enabled merchants to choose destinations which creates a deep link inside the push notification step.

Push notification step – choosing destination

User research

In-depth usability testing

After we landed on our initial design, I worked closely with our researcher to plan our first usability testing. Users unanimously called out that the overall experience felt intuitive and effortless.

“This is exactly what we’ve been looking for our app.”

Merchant @ Buce Plants

“Message Flows has the potential to change how we use Tapcart as a marketing platform.”

Merchant @ Pusheen

On the other hand, merchants reacted to a few areas differently than how we expected. For example, when the users saw ‘Activate now’ while hovering inside the flow component, they thought clicking on the component will activate the flow right away. This thinking caused them to hesitate on taking further actions. So, I adjusted the copy to read 'Get started' for clarity.

Iterated design

Reflections

Whereas most users thought that the overall experience was easy to understand, 30% of them believed that they could benefit from additional support. This experience taught me that providing users with onboarding may still be necessary for a new product regardless of ease of use or complexity.