What's wrong with the existing emails?
Travelers use transactional emails for information, action-taking, and as references. Unfortunately, the existing emails suffered from low open rates and an influx of support tickets.
By partnering with the support team, we gathered user feedback related to emails, highlighting issues with content and functionality, resulting in confusion and frustration amongst travelers.
Old branding colors, like this yellow, were still being used, resulting in inconsistency between in-product and external communications.
Additionally, images were incredibly small, making it difficult for travelers to view which hotel or room they booked.
Outdated and contradicting information was a common theme in these emails that caused confusion for travelers.
For example, “Check-In Instructions were included to hotel cancelation emails (not to mention the spelling inconsistency of “cancelation”).
Emails were riddled with broken links, jumbling important booking information, and, in some instances, failing to send completely.
This example shows important information per traveler like seats and e-tickets. However, seats are being duplicated and e-tickets are only assigned to one traveler instead of each respective traveler.
Restrictions to consider
Before designing, we needed to fully understand all of the restrictions imposed by the major email clients such as Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail. In close collaboration with engineering, we identified technical constraints and discussed tradeoffs such as:
- Typeface - Realizing that we couldn’t use the custom typeface that’s used in-product, I aimed to find a typeface that was widely accepted by most email providers and optimized for accessibility.
- Email clipping - Cuts off content when the email size is too large.
- Limited functionality - Emails don’t have the same flexibility as a site like horizontal scrolling or hover states.
We had to find a solution that could work around these restrictions, while still providing an engaging experience that enabled discoverability and quick comprehension.
Content first, then design
In collaboration with our content strategist, we crafted the information hierarchy for each email. Our approach involved categorizing emails based on their intent, message type, and if any action(s) was needed. Drawing from user feedback, audit, and competitive analysis, we organized the information to prioritize the traveler’s needs.
Explorations
Due to the variety of email types, it was important to create an email design that was flexible and to unify the in-product branding experience in order to avoid confusion based on user feedback.
- Which patterns offer the best structure for hosting and segmenting information to improve ease and speed of content scanning?
- How will we incorporate co-branding instances?
- How might we design accessible emails?
Phase 2 - Design per email type
After finalizing the email layout, I then explored different design directions for each email with the goal to improve discoverability by providing travelers with relevant and actionable information.
Showing 2 of the most sent email types (out of 60+ emails) as examples of design explorations.
*Happy to share more of the email designs upon request.
Booking Confirmation
The challenge with booking confirmation emails was developing a cohesive, yet dynamic structure that accommodated all 5 booking types and their unique use cases. Understanding the most complex use cases helped to assess the design's scalability.
Flight Delay
The old email overwhelmed travelers with a wall of text, making it hard to distill important details about their flight. In an effort to make this email valuable, I focused on highlighting what was impacted, delay duration, and the type of support we can offer to travelers.
Results
After working closely with engineering to bring the designs to life, we rolled out the new emails incrementally. At the project’s inception, we documented two primary success metrics: email related escalations and send rate failures.
80%
reduction in support tickets
95%
reduction in send rate failures
Due to the positive user feedback, this initiated a company-wide adoption across all teams to adopt the new email design. As someone who values documentation, I created email guidelines and supplementary resources for teams to use which helped save time and minimized context switching once off the project.
