Company:
AWeber – Email Marketing Software
My Role:
2015 – Sr. UX Designer
2018-2025 – Product Design Manager
Problem to Solve:
Creating and nurturing an email list is essential to a modern small business, especially web-based businesses with no physical storefront. If you can’t communicate with your audience, you’re out of business. AWeber creates tools to make this communication easy and powerful, but the design of their email message editor had fallen behind the times. The window was narrow and fixed-width. The system menus and notification bars at the top pushed the editor down the screen until it was nearly below the fold. Overall, the editing process felt clunky and archaic, and wasn’t comparable with other competitors in the space.
I saw an opportunity to improve the message editor in a huge way while still being able to break the work up into small enough chunks to fit on the product roadmap. I pitched a plan, along with detailed wireframes, to the Director of Product and was given approval to proceed.
The project transformed the archaic editor into a sleek, self-contained environment with a modern look, improved interaction design, and a full-screen experience. The redesign also paved the way for future modernization efforts that my team accomplished in subsequent years, such as applying our component-based design system and responsive design, optimized for phones.
My Contributions:
As Sr. UX Designer
- Customer interviews
- Heuristic analysis
- Wireframes and prototyping
- UX support for software developers
- Usability testing with customers
- Further iterations on initial design
As Product Design Manager
- Setting the vision with the team
- UX an UI design review & critique
- QA testing and review
Screenshots
BEFORE: the old message editor
AFTER: my initial redesign in 2015
TODAY: utilizing our modern design system & responsive design for mobile
