EmailOctopus

Email marketing platform EmailOctopus wanted to redesign their product to incorporate several exciting new features and to help reach a new audience.

The project encompassed brand workshops, user research sessions, extensive prototyping and a full hi-fidelity redesign of the platform all delivered in an express timeframe.

Brief

EmailOctopus hadn’t undergone a redesign since it’s launch in 2014 but had increased its user base substantially and was looking to build on its success with the launch of several new features.

On the brand side, they wanted to stay true to their roots, maintaining the warm, playful feel of the brand mascot and the core colour scheme whilst also reflecting the maturity of a more established and reliable SaaS product.

Approach

Research & planning

As a collaborative team we needed to get under the skin of the redesign project and ask some searching questions regarding the overall direction the brand was going to take in the future.

Another important aspect that needed to be addressed was how they were organising their features, what they were called and how new features would fit into the overall architecture.

A series of workshops were held at the EmailOctopus offices in Hackney to deep dive into these aspects borrowing techniques used in design sprints to help tease out insights and make decisions quickly. Crucially, existing clients were surveyed as to their experiences with the product providing critical feedback to guide the redesign.

Prototyping

Testing our ideas was imperative and through user journey mapping and then wireframing we were quickly able to consider alternative UX solutions to some of the core areas of the product, saving time later in the hi-fidelity design phase of the project.

Visual design

Hi-fidelity designs were created in Sketch and then prototyped using Invision to test and confirm our assumptions from earlier in the project. We iterated designs quickly and by creating a reusable pattern library could quickly build designs with a series of consistent components. The library then became an invaluable resource for building out the designs in code – enabling developers to create a parallel coded library of UI elements.

With regards to the brand, the core colour palette was maintained but combined with neutrals to create a friendly but grown-up feel to the product with some quirkier, illustrated elements introduced for the promotional modules and empty states.

Results

The redesigned product launched early in 2019 and has been very well received by existing users with a notable increase in logins and activity across the feature set. Further enhancements are scheduled for later in the year and Vector have already been engaged to redesign the EmailOctopus marketing website.