SMS Workflow Automation

2022

Scaling product and increasing user engagement through campaign automation services.

Role

Product designer

A browser window showing the CEQUENS automations dashboard next to a phone displaying SMS and Instagram notifications on its lock screen.

CEQUENS is a CPaas platform, specialized in offering various communication services to businesses like SMS marketing

Problem "a user story"

A user frequently needs to send personalized SMS campaigns on recurring dates (e.g., customer birthdays). However, the current process requires manual filtering and sorting of contacts in an Excel sheet, uploading the list, and scheduling each campaign. This repetitive, time-consuming workflow could benefit from an automated solution.

"How might we automate sending personalized SMS Messages?"

Business goals:

  • Scale product and increase user engagement: by Introducing automation services.
  • Boost campaign efficiency: through seamless integration with pre-saved contacts."

Process

  • Stakeholder interview
  • Secondary Research
  • Use cases & feature prioritization
  • Task flows & wireframing
  • UI design
Illustrated user story: a user from Company X asks to upload contact numbers and birthdays and have a custom message sent automatically, beside Nuha and the product owner discussing workflow automation in a meeting.

Understanding & defining constraints

Secondary research:

Starting with Research was vital not only to understand the market or study competitors, but also to understand what's marketing automation and why it's important for businesses. Understanding the business then studying the UX from competitors in the market like InfoBip, MessageBird & Gameball ensured i could begin design with proper insights.

Secondary research summary mapping target industries (retail, fin-tech, banks, sharing economy) to themes (retention, loyalty, conversion rate) and possible automation use cases such as birthday campaigns, onboarding messages and order confirmations.

Starting with an MVP

We prioritized the user experience in terms of impact vs ease of implementation
and decided start with the problem statement, Sending recurring messages on a specific date for each contact

Requirements for sending SMS based on a date attribute: user actions (create, save as draft, pause, resume and cancel a flow) and constraints (contact numbers as entry point, dates as trigger, SMS as action), next to the task flow diagrams.

Sketching and presenting wire-frames to the Product owner and Tech lead to we decide what best way to move forward. the PO had a good understanding of the business and technology used in CEQUENS to ensure that we're building something that's feasible.

Low-fidelity wireframes of the automation flow: an empty state for creating a flow, a contact list picker, a Send SMS form and a table of created flows.

UI & Handoff

After 2 weeks it was time to ship this off. the design is based on CEQUENS design system components we already had.

Final UI of CEQUENS Automations: the flow list with an Anniversary Date template, the date-of-birth trigger setup, the choose-contacts modal with an empty-state error, and a running flow's detail page.
More final UI screens: choosing contact groups, the Send SMS step with a personalized birthday message, and the flow detail page in running and draft states.

Project demo

For handoff we had a squad meeting with the developers team who were going to work on this project, where we discussed the flow and some of the technical aspects. I used Zeplin to export designs and map screen flows.

Reflections 🧐

Measuring usability

Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to iterate on this project. but if i had, I'd definitely have to measure usability and collect feedback from users. the things I'd have like to observe were:
- Did users struggle with a specific step?
- Could the flow have been further streamlined?

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