The Gumbamail sweater: what to do when you don’t know where to start
A journey from exploring an unknown project to identify the problem and design solutions using multiple approaches
When I started this journey with Gumbamail I didn’t know what to expect: the details of the project were unknown and blurred to me and I was asked to reduce a Bounce Rate index around 80%. Moreover, there were some cornerstones that needed to be better defined in order to have a well rounded product that could effectively help users in their journey.
After two month of redesigning this ecosystem, the Bounce Rate of the landing page dropped from 80% to 55,3% with a 45,4% improvement and, moreover, we saw so many metrics improving since the redesign was published. The Average time on page for example increased by 26,5% in just one month.
Discoveries were made in order to first understand the context and the ecosystem and then (Untangle the yarn and Sorting out the yarn colors: Starting to define the context), we defined the problem and issues to resolve (Define the yarn scheme: The problem statement itself) and then we planned a dedicated plan to design our solutions (Starting to knit the yarn: Different paths to solve the problem).
All the improvements came from this journey that started off with a bunch of different yarn balls that need to be knitted together to design the best sweater for users.
Starting a new knitting project: The wicked problem
Gumbamail is a mail merger plugin for Gmail that allows users to send personalized campaigns to larger lists of contacts, but it can’t be defined using just this statement. Gumbamail is also an idea, a design and a project developed by persons that wants to give users the possibility to use a different approach to the existing mail mergers.
It was developed by Acumbamail (one of Growens’ business units), a Spanish based Email, SMS and transactional services Marketing provider, and released in 2020.
Gumbamail ecosystem is made of a micro-website and a Chrome web store page of the plugin, which allows the user to download the plugin itself in their Gmail account. To download the plugin, the optimized funnel would see the main part of the traffic coming from organic/referral search to the website, then going to the Chrome web store and then installing the plugin in their Gmail account. The funnel could also start from the Chrome web store page skipping the first step.
Since the release of this plugin things went differently and Gumbamail’s website reached an overall Bounce Rate index around 80%, while the Chrome web store reached 64%. This was enough for Gumbamail business owners to look for solutions on how to lower this index. So Ignacio Arriaga and Rafael Cabanillas, co-founders of Acumbamail, asked the Growens group design department to take a look at the issue and to leverage the current situation. In Growens it’s common for BUs to ask the holding for additional resources when needed.
I have been part of the Growens group design team as Junior UX Designer since 2021 and this was the first data informed project that I was assigned to, since entering the company. Before I was asked to solve the problem I didn’t know what Gumbamail was on a detailed level: product data, ecosystem, the way the product works and so many other aspects were blurred for me.
I also like to knit in my free time. This is why using the yarn and knit metaphor was something natural and easy to me, that I could relate to and hold onto, while thinking about this case study.
This situation, plus the fact that in Growens we don’t just want to solve business problems with design solutions but also we are trying to push innovation, leads us to start our redesign journey.
- First, by unraveling the so-called “Wicked problem” to explore more widely and deeply the context
- Second, by applying the Double Diamond model to design effective solutions based on what I discovered.
This case study tells the story of a project that went from a request of leveraging some business metric to the quest for allowing users to discover Gumbamail value, its WOW factor.
Untangle the yarn: The unknown problem
As designers, when we start working on a project, we start to learn as much as possible about the context, we do research and discoveries to get familiar with it and we formulate a question, the “problem statement”. In this case, the problem was unknown and the situation looked like a tangle of threads: I didn’t know much about Gumbamail and it wasn’t clear what to do.
For these reasons the discovering part of this project was challenging because I needed to explore the ecosystem, gather all possible qualitative and quantitative data from different sources and then define the problem and a roadmap that could help us proceed in a clearer direction.
Using a Miro workspace to represent all the findings in a synthetic way, we started by exploring the product ecosystem using screenshots to point out what could create friction with users, following an approach similar to an heuristic analysis.
This process helped us to understand how Gumbamail works from a UX and UI point of view, specifically:
- How users arrive at Gumbamail (Acquisition funnel analysis) from different channels and install the product;
- How users use Gumbamail (Usage funnel analysis) where we put ourselves in the user shoes, trying to understand what they usually do from installing the product to creating and send a campaign;
- How the user can purchase or upgrade their plan (Purchase funnel analysis) while using Gumbamail free pln.
This funnel analysis helped us to gather insights about the Gumbamail plugin, the interactions designed and used by the people, and the user journeys.
We used them to define a series of questions and elements that needed further qualitative analysis or more quantitative data.
For the qualitative part, we decided to involve stakeholders in some interview sessions in order to gather data from different perspectives and sources to confirm hypotheses or to explore more in depth the insights.
More specifically, we involved:
- Marketing: to understand better how users arrive to install Gumbamail, what is the strategy (campaigns, ADS, ecc.) already adopted or to be done, if there are any tools to analyze and monitor marketing metrics and who is the target audience;
- Technology: to learn more about the features of the plugin, how they were built, which programming language and libraries were used both for developing and design and what users can and can’t do with the plugin;
- Product: to discover more about the plugin itself, its Value proposition, what makes Gumbamail different from other similar products, what it’s the goal we want to achieve, what are the metrics to be paid attention to and other aspects that helped us to visualize the product as a whole.
From the quantitative side, we had a lot of data coming from different sources (Google Analytics, .csv files, Google Sheet, dedicated dashboards, ecc.) that helped us to confirm hypotheses and to have a more analytical approach since we couldn’t only make analysis and choices based only on assumptions that could have been biased.
All the things that we discovered and gathered helped us to define a better context and a roadmap of the project, but what did we discover exactly?
Sorting out the yarn colors: Starting to define the context
On the positive side, we discovered that people looked for Gumbamail landing and its Chrome web store page and they wanted to discover what the plugin does:
- The CTR (Click Through Rate) of the Google result page were above 50–60%, meaning that people click on the link of the page when they see it;
- New visitors were above 90%, meaning that a lot of new people arrive at the entrance of the ecosystem;
- Gumbamail can easily be found because the website link is well positioned in various search result pages. There’s also a lot of traffic coming from different sources that enhances this result.
These three points puzzled us when we considered that the Bounce rate for the website was around 80% and for the Chrome web store 64%. Moreover, the percentage of users installing and actually using the plugin was very low, like 12% of the total visitors of the entire ecosystem: the common behavior was to install Gumbamail, create a campaign and a list of recipients, and then stop using it.
Why is that? Why weren’t people using the plugin?
From the insights and data we defined multiple possible problems: the information in the page wasn’t clear enough, the UI choices were tricky for the user to understand at first, the tone of voice was too cold or too direct and so on.
But why did users continue to use the freemium plan, without upgrading, canceling their account or, in case of higher plans, even downgrading?
Define the yarn scheme: The problem statement itself
So at the end of this really first part of the project we ended with some things to change from one hand and some unanswered questions from the other hand.
The first outcomes resembled a to-do list, so we used them to define:
- a roadmap on the practical tasks for this project
- the metrics to monitor changes right now and for the future.
We needed to implement Amplitude for Gumbamail plugin to keep track of users behaviors while a Google Data Studio dashboard would have allowed us to quickly look at the performance of the entire ecosystem.
But lots of question remained unanswered:
- Why do people use Gumbamail?
- Why do people stop using Gumbamail?
- Why do people leave and uninstall even after using the free plan?
In a few words: users couldn’t understand the value of Gumbamail.
From a marketing perspective the Value proposition of the product wasn’t completely defined and communicated to users: Acumbamail knew that they wanted to build a cheaper alternative to email merger laser focused for Gmail users since there were existing similar products already making money and there were indicators of interest in search, reviews, etc.
So our first problem statement was: discover and analyze the Value proposition of Gumbamail, define it and then communicate it to the users.
Another issue was the target: we still had the same buyer and user personas of Acumbamail, but after almost two years of Gumbamail being in the world we could prioritize other profiles.
So our second problem statement was: find out and define who can be interested in Gumbamail and what users expect and can do with it.
All data, assumptions, list of changes/adjustment and next steps of the project were summarized and presented to the business stakeholders involved but also to our tech and marketing colleagues.
Starting to knit the yarn: Different paths to solve the problem
After presenting the outcomes of the research and discovery phase and the problem statements themselves, we were able to define together with the business, marketing and tech stakeholders what can be done for Gumbamail.
It was time to start designing! But wait, we had just an entire list of assumptions: so we needed to confirm them in a more analytical fashion.
After finding the “Wicked problem” we defined a “Three stream plan” each stream proceeding along the Double Diamond 5 steps:
- Discover
- Explore and Define
- Problem Definition
- Develop and test
- Deliver and listen
The three streams were:
- Research: strategies to define proto-personas and Value proposition specific for Gumbamail;
- Metrics: implement all the metrics to monitor the Gumbamail project;
- Usability: changes and adjustment to the interface and interaction design.
— The Research Double Diamond: the first stream
This stream’s goal was to know better the users and their contexts when choosing Gumbamail: the Jobs to be done.
Designers found their work fulfilling the needs and goals of people, so we used proto-personas to elaborate on these needs and goals. We used them to make all the stakeholders agree on the customers and users jobs-to-be-done. (1. Discover).
We used Hotjar observing behaviors on the real platform and Usertesting asking people to elaborate on their choices to extract some insights and define some proto-personas drafts about what users and customers would do with the plugin, what they are looking for in a plugin like Gumbamail and what they would and wouldn’t like to have. (2. Explore and Define)
Since the main goal was to define the Value proposition of Gumbamail we decided to use a different approach and use the Value Proposition Canvas by Design a Better Business. This Canvas helps in understanding customers, including their jobs-to-be-done (what they want to achieve with the product), pains (what makes them angry in their current context), and gains (what makes them happy), as well as what the product offers to them in order to meet these three traits.
We defined three proto-personas, using Hotjar and Usertesting results, with as many characteristics as we could (a self-employed, a full-time employer and even a full-time student) to fill out the user part of the canvas to then match their needs in the product part (3. Problem definition).
In this case, we left blank the product offer and organized a workshop with stakeholders to fill it out and discover what Gumbamail has to offer to this kind of customers: this method helped us to define a Value proposition for the product effectively, by designing it together with real users data, designers and stakeholders (4. Develop and test).
The resulting Value proposition for Gumbamail was made of three parts:
- Jobs-to-be-done, what Gumbamail does for users and what offers;
- Keywords, that can be used for various purpose to communicate;
- Value proposition itself, with the goal that Gumbamail wants to achieve for the target.
Of all the streams this was the most needed in order to start working effectively on meaningful interfaces for the website and the plugin itself, in the second stream.
The Value proposition was also presented to stakeholders and a presentation/documentation was created in order to inform future projects (5. Deliver and listen).
— The Metrics Double Diamond: the second stream
The goal of this stream was to have a place to monitor the product ecosystem using specific metrics. Until that moment we had defined a list of metrics during the discovery phase but it was time to put them on the ground.
First, we understood and explored what Gumbamail ecosystem already had (1. Discover): Google Analytics running on their website and Chrome web store, and no tracking on the plugin itself since there wasn’t a tool to track events in Gmail accounts while maintaining users’ privacy.
In order to solve this problem we explored Amplitude, a tool that can track users’ events in each Gumbamail account (anonymously), and Google Analytics (and also Google Data Studio) (2. Explore and Define). I personally had to keep a lot up with the two tools: I learned how to use Amplitude from scratch and I also completed all the Google courses on Analytics and Data studio.
So we figured out that we needed to set up two environments to effectively monitor the entire Gumbamail ecosystem: one for the plugin and for the website/Chrome web store (3. Problem definition).
We then set up (4. Develop and test):
- Google Data Studio for both the website and the Chrome web store in order to track meaningful metrics (like the Conversion rate) and benchmark the data before and after our redesign;
- Amplitude dashboard to track users behaviors on their account while using Gumbamail (clicking on a button, hovering on an element …) and product metrics like DAU/MAU, Average sessions per users, and time spent on a feature.
These two monitoring environments were also shared with all stakeholders giving everyone the possibility to keep an eye on the entire ecosystem. Both environments will play a role in the future strategy of the project with a consistent monthly monitoring session. (5. Deliver and listen).
— The Usability Double Diamond: the third stream
The goal for this stream was to better understand the full range of the Gumbamail interactions and to improve them.
We had already performed an heuristic analysis of the Gumbamail ecosystem so we used it as a starting point (1. Discover). We then made two benchmark analyses: we made screenshots of the major competitors of Gumbamail. We worked as a team on these tasks: in order to have fresh eyes for the analysis, I asked my colleagues to analyze each competitor’s interface and wrote down some notes on Miro keeping in mind a series of questions that were decided first. At the end we gathered all the notes together and analyzed the insights, defining some best practices that could be applied to Gumbamail (2. Explore and Define).
The heuristics results and the benchmarks highlights gave us actionable to-do, but since in the Gumbamail ecosystem there are a lot of touch-points, we started prioritizing adjustments and changes (3. Problem definition).
We started from the Gumbamail landing page changing the navigation of the page, the hero section (both the text and the image), organizing the contents, and making the header menu sticky. We also added some new sections to better explain Gumbamail features, value and how it works (a FAQ section and a “trust” section with reviews about the product) and made some changes to the pricing page (like tooltips to give details of the various plans).
During this redesign activities, we had various checkpoints with stakeholders in order to define better ways to present the product with copy, micro-copy and graphic assets (4. Develop and test).
The interfaces went live and we are still monitoring these changes in order to understand if our actions delivered results or if adjustments might be needed (5. Deliver and listen).
We did the same process for the plugin itself:
- we redesigned some flows in order to make them frictionless;
- defined a Pattern Library that has helped maintain consistent interfaces;
- made changes to the UI and the contents.
These changes are not yet developed, but as soon as they are we are going to monitor their performances as well.
Trying on the sweater: What were the results?
After the new landing page redesign was published we were able to close two (Usability and Research) of the three streams. It was time to use the metrics of the third stream and see what we had achieved.
We decided that after the redesign we would have used Google Data Studio and Amplitude dashboards to create a monthly report for the Gumbamail team, to keep track of the changes and monitor the ecosystem, allowing us to design improvements if needed.
After a month, we released the first report for Gumbamail, analyzing mostly if the redesign of the landing page was effective and met the goal of reducing the Bounce rate.
We found that users were more interested in the page and were more likely to stay and explore its contents.
- The Bounce rate of the landing page dropped from 80% to 55,3% with an improvement of 45,4% and the Chrome Web store page dropped from 64% to 55,5% with an improvement of 16,4%;
- The Average time on the landing page increased by 26,5% changing from 3:12 to 4:03 minutes;
Using Hotjar click-map and hover-map, we also discovered that the new sections and contents were used a lot.
The monitoring of the Conversion rate is a bit different: since up to that moment we didn’t have previous data to understand how the Conversion rate of the ecosystem was performing, we started to keep track of this metric and at the time of writing this case study we are still working on trying to understand a trend for it.
We are still working on delivering the redesigned interfaces for the plugin in Gmail but nevertheless we keep track of the Gumbamail ecosystem monitoring some important metrics like the DAU/MAU, to understand the proportion of active users that engage with the product in a single day, the Average time spent in the plugin and for each feature. These metrics will help us in the future to understand and monitor changes and be prepared.
Do I like the sweater? Conclusion
Gumbamail is a really interesting project: it’s a small one but it made me realize that all projects are the same and they need the same attention and care, regardless of size. Moreover, these small projects are useful tools for designers: they can help understand complexity and how to untangle it, and it’s worth it to see an idea take shape on screen and on whoever is involved.
Even if it is secondary to a main product line (Acumbamail platform) and the priority in its development is lower than the more lucrative parts of Acumbamail business, we decided with Ignacio Arriaga and Rafael Cabanillas to dedicate some effort to do things in the proper way and see if this could improve the first “super lean version” of the solution that was released a couple of years before.
This project made me realize that doing things right and meeting a goal is not easy and it’s not something that can be done in a day or two. There are no written rules that all the research, the problem definition phases and the designs will work out: it’s a trial and error process.
Especially for this project I asked myself sometimes if all the steps we did (from the discovery to the analysis, to the research, the definition of the problem and more research) and all the analysis we carried on were needed for, in the end, changing some contents in a website and some flows in a platform, but we were not just redesigning some interfaces, we were considering the whole Gumbamail product and its value proposition. So we needed to understand the context in order to realize a better version of it.
I started this case study by saying that “Gumbamail is also an idea, a design and a project developed by persons for other people” and this sentence is full of meaning: it is filled by understanding, passion, awareness of a bunch of marketing, design and tech people for the users, their behaviors, needs and goals, and without all the research, planning and sharing we did and we continue to do, all this understanding of the system would be impossible.
From my side I can say that I have learned a lot:
- A new world of digital products (mail mergers);
- New approaches and methods for product design;
- New ways to prioritize activities;
- New competences to monitor progress in effective and caring ways.
However, I think we also learned that behind an interface, behind code and behind metrics there are people and when you start to care about them you start to innovate and create something beautiful. Moreover, when you deep dive in a context you can’t go back and you start to want to be part of.
Now I really care for Gumbamail, its people and its users.
Researching, analyzing, designing, implementing and monitoring are words that describe an approach to empathize with a whole that’s made of people, projects, data and products/services.
