Email Send Status
Helping marketers understand how their messages are sending to their customers
Challenge
Clients frequently contacted support due to confusion around email sends, struggling to find relevant status information. This lack of visibility created frustration and inefficiencies for both users and internal teams.
Objective
Improve transparency by providing clear insights into email queue and message send status. By designing a more intuitive system, we aimed to reduce reliance on support and empower users with self-service solutions.
Impact
Reduced support inquiries, increased user trust, and a more seamless messaging experience. With clearer system status communication, users felt more in control of the messages they sent and could make informed decisions faster.
01 Discover and Define
02 Create Understanding
03 Solve For
04 Validate Direction
05 Post Development
Client feedback
Design evaluation
What impacts a message?
How does a message process?
Table updates
Advanced flyout
Contextual tooltips
Client reviews
Final direction
Impact
Next steps
01 Discover and Define
Client Feedback
Abercrombie:
Is my message sending and how much longer will it take?
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L.L. Bean:
Did something go wrong with my message and how do I know?
Design Evaluation
Jakob's Law:
Users may not realize they need to hover over the send time for details.
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Fitts' Law:
Hovering over the send time disrupts page navigation.
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Information Architecture:
The view lacks a clear overview, with key details hidden in a small flyout.
02 Create Understanding
What impacts a Message Send?
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Failed Delivery Reasons
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Audience Behavior
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Contact drops from the audience
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Contact changes subscription status
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Platform Behavior
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Rendered subject line is empty and there's no default
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Too many links embedded into the message
Uncommon Behavior
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Transport configuration
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New render engine bugs
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How does an email message process?
What
You can have multiple messages sending at once with content and some messages have sub jobs (throttled)
How
You have a limit of message workers in an account that is allocated to send your messages
When
Messages will send at the scheduled send time and they are not dependant on other jobs
03 Solve For
Table Updates
Advanced Flyout
Contextual Tooltips
What we like
Updating the total sent to reflect how many messages will send
Introduce “Sending Rate” and “Estimated End” to give users a better understanding of how their messages are performing
Introducing “Queue Order” and “Queue Time” to help users understand what’s next and how long a message has been ready to send
04 Validate Direction
Client Reviews
Highlights
Seeing audience count helps paint a fuller picture, but Actuals were preferred over percentage bars
Sending Rate was well received, but there was a concern that it might cause more confusion and questions
Paused/Cancelled By and On was well received to help create an audit trail of who was working with the messages
Queued Order was more important than seeing message priority… However, we made a mistake and found that there’s no REAL concept of queued on this email sent page
Final Direction
Table updates
1. Remove the concept of “Queued” and “Error” message statuses
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2. Status Indicator in cell header
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3. Warning indicators to solve for the message failures
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4. Estimation of Audience sends, since they can fluctuate as messages are sending
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5. Hover on indicators, not badges
Modal updates
1. Remove Sending Rate and Estimated End Date as they were too complicated to solve for, but kept Run Time to help bridge the gap
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2. Keep the concept of “queued” here to indicate messages that are upcoming
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3. Dynamic banner to showcase when your message is sending healthy vs when there’s a problem.
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4. Surface the pause/cancel actions along with the ‘go to message’ route for users.
05 Post Development
Impact
Next Steps
Surfacing system status for a historically challenging platform can be tricky. Some clients were unfamiliar with audience estimates, making it a new concept for them
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Customer inquiries have
begun to minimize their
messages by proactively
communicating the status
of email sends. This has
led to ensuring users feel
confident in the system's
reliability.
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Improved overall satisfaction and reduced frustration of the email-sending process by connecting the dots for our users after sending a message.
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Scaling the solution to fit the other batch channels of SMS, Push, Rest
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Aligning on how to show system status for automations
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Creating an understanding how system status is applicable for orchestrations and data jobs