Emails and User/Customer Experience:

MaxMilhas is a fast growing Brazilian tech company that that connects people who wants to travel and save up in flight tickets with the people who wants make extra money by selling their flight miles.

MaxMilhas an average 3.000 flight tickets per day. Each one of this sells triggers at least 4 emails to be delivered to ticket buyers and miles sellers. Thats at least 12 thousand emails per day just triggered by sales. Add to that number other transactions such as account changes, password recovery, new sign-ups and you can imagine how that number is actually waaaaaay higher.

Mapping the flow

The first thing to do was to find and organize all the emails in the flow and the rules that trigged a email to be send to the user.

This was a really difficult task. The company had no documentation, and the rules were buried and hard coded into the system. Also, because the existing emails were created and implemented as need demanded during the company's first 4 years, there was no one that knew the whole flow, all the possible emails and rules.

After almost a week of work, digging into code and talking to stakeholders of the Operations department we were able find and map all the 84 existing emails and as well the business rules that trigger each email to be sent.

We categorized the emails in 3 distinct flows, related to the context the user would be when receiving the email: Signup and account management, tickets purchase, and sales of miles.

Reviewing the content

After mapping the existing emails, we went through each one of then in order to identify what information they delivered and how that content was relevant for the user.

The emails copy were a bit too long and even redundant in some cases. Some information was even outdated and needed to be corrected. We took notes of this issues and ask the Content department for help.

Creating component based design system

While the content was being re-written, we started the design phase. The first thing to be noted was the large number of possible emails. It would extremely time consuming a little bit dumb to redesign each one of them individually.

What I did was to create a design system inspired by the Atomic methodology. The system consisted in creating patterns starting from basic elements such typography, font-size, and color, gradually joining this elements into more complex components until finally forming templates.

This approach allowed to reuse code and design patterns in a very effective way, saving development and design time as well allowing to create pretty much any type of email by combining the right components together.

Building basic templates

After building the system, we created some templates that would serve as samples. This was important to give solid understanding of how the components could be put together, and to show to stakeholders and the development team that the system would work well.

We deliberately choose the longer emails to show the information organization and how this design system would make it easier to build complex emails while given clarity to information presented and delivering a better experience to the users.

Personalizing the messages

The next step we took was starting a customizing process of the messages in a way that the emails, and in special it visual would relate more the user's moment. For exemple, after buying a ticket to Sao Paulo the header of confirmation email would be and image of a beautiful place in Sao Paulo. If the email delivers a "bad new"to the user, the image would more neutral, but yet without transmitting a bad vibe.

Conclusion

After we shipped the project, our communication with user improved by a lot. The main highlights were:

• The visual of the emails became consistent, and was clearly related to company’s brand and identity.
• The information was clear, making it easier to spot what was important and understand the communication. In consequence, the phone calls made by clients unable to understand the what they have bought or what they should do next dropped.
• We were able to save a lot of development and design time, specially when new emails that weren’t needed/discovered at the time appeared latter on the development pipeline.