The Challenge
For small businesses, the ability to communicate with their audience is existential: if you can’t reach your list, you can’t sustain your business. AWeber’s message editor was once a pioneering tool, but by the mid-2010s it had fallen behind both customer expectations and competitive benchmarks. The editor was constrained to a fixed, narrow window, cluttered by system menus and notification bars that pushed the editing canvas almost below the fold.
The experience felt clunky and outdated, undermining AWeber’s value proposition at the very moment when email creation — the product’s most essential task — needed to feel effortless and inspiring. Competitors were offering cleaner, more immersive editors, and there was real risk of losing both new and long-term customers if AWeber didn’t modernize.
My Role
- 2015 – Senior UX Designer: I identified the opportunity, pitched a modernization plan to product leadership, and designed the initial full-screen, self-contained editor. From the beginning, I designed it with responsiveness and mobile-first principles in mind — something the legacy editor could not accommodate — so the foundation would be flexible enough for continuous improvement.
- 2018–2025 – Product Design Manager: I set the vision for continued modernization, evolving the editor alongside our design system (AWeber UI). I guided my team through critiques, reviews, and refinements to ensure consistency as the editor matured into a cornerstone experience across both desktop and mobile.
The Approach
- Strategic framing – Positioned the editor redesign not as a cosmetic update, but as a reset of AWeber’s most critical experience: giving small business owners modern tools to communicate with confidence.
- Responsive by design – Anticipated the need for mobile optimization from the start, ensuring the new editor could scale seamlessly across devices and adapt to emerging design standards.
- Experience transformation – Delivered a full-screen, focused environment that reduced distractions and put content creation at the center.
- Foundation for consistency – Established design patterns that went on to influence other AWeber editors, including the landing page editor and later the Workflows builder. These patterns became unified through the AWeber UI design system, which my team and I have evolved over several years.
- Incremental delivery – Structured the work so that improvements could roll out in manageable phases, proving value early while setting the stage for longer-term transformation.
- Leadership in practice – Transitioned from individual execution to team leadership, ensuring that design quality, customer empathy, and strategic goals remained aligned.
The Outcome
The new message editor transformed a dated, frustrating workflow into a modern, immersive experience that reinforced AWeber’s reputation in a competitive landscape.
- For customers: Writing and designing emails became faster, easier, and accessible across devices — directly strengthening the communication lifeline of their businesses.
- For the business: The redesign revitalized AWeber’s core differentiator, and its design language set the precedent for other flagship tools, creating consistency across the platform.
- For the team: The editor became the proving ground for AWeber UI, a design system that continues to unify product experiences and accelerate development.
The editor’s longevity, centrality, and influence on subsequent product experiences underscore its sustained strategic value as the foundation for AWeber’s modern design language.
Screenshots
The old message editor (pre-2015)
The initial redesign
As of 2025 – utilizing our modern design system & responsive design for mobile
