The company

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a market leading SaaS company, helping businesses grow with smarter email marketing, CRM and more. Brevo has 900+ employees around the world.

My role

As Senior Product Designer at Brevo, I led the end-to-end design of a new campaign reports experience from discovery and research to solution design and hand-off. I ran design critiques and reviews, ensured alignment with business and technical goals and collaborated with the design system team for long-term consistency. Post-launch, I owned iteration based on data and user feedback.

The Why

This is what the page looked like before the redesign:

Aside from being outdated there was other issues with the page:

• There’s very little visual hierarchy. Basically, all metrics are listed in two columns with no structure to guide viewers. Aside from being difficult to consume this makes it difficult for us to scale without making it worse.
• The information architecture doesn’t allow us to limit some features to premium customers only and upsell them to drive plan upgrades
• As the page was built before our design system, it was inconsistent with the rest of the platform and it relied on legacy tech stack.

Discovery

The discovery started by looking at existing usage behaviour on Fullstory. Most users didn’t spend much time on it, they just looked at the metrics and moved on.

One interesting pattern caught my eye while looking at the session recordings on Fullstory. The most clicked internal links on the page were the ones that lead to contact segmentation.

After checking Fullstory, the collection of feedbacks and requests on Harvestr, researching our main competitors, gathering information from CSMs and checking on previous research I knew enough on the topic to start meeting users.

I met 10 different users trying to understand and expand on the following topics:

• What do they look for on the page? Which metrics are the most important, which secondary?
• How do they act on the information? How does knowing the numbers help them with next steps in the short term and adjust their strategy in the long term?
• I noticed a lot of people export the report. What do they do with the exported CSV? How about PDFs?

Key findings

Here are the findings, on which I based the redesign:

• Most users mainly care about the big metrics in the email space: delivery rate, open rate, click rate, unsubscribes. Everything else is secondary details serving niche cases.
• Users care about different things during the different phases of the campaign lifecycle: in the first few hours of the campaign deliverability is the most important. After that: opens and clicks. At the end: Revenue, sales, bookings or whatever their conversion is.
• Some people don’t know what each metric means, how to improve it and why. Proper tooltips with explanations are needed.
• For ecommerce businesses tracking of revenue and products sold is nonexistent on the old page, which blocks their ability to optimise campaigns and find a good email marketing strategy
• Marketers rarely look at their entire audience at once. Like us designers, they work with personas, so filtering and breakdowns are important to make sure results are specific to any segment of the audience.
• Customers use naming conventions to differentiate campaigns for different countries, markets, product verticals, teams, etc. A proper tagging system is needed so campaigns can be organised and analysed.
• Marketers in B2B companies and sales driven businesses use opening or clicking on email campaigns as interest signals, then export everyone who interacted with their campaign and share it with their sales teams so they can go via the sales funnel. That’s why the most clicked links on the old page are the ones leading to the contacts behind each action.
• Humans have a natural competitive curiosity regarding their performance compared to their team, company, industry, etc. A benchmarking feature would be appreciated.
• The PDF and CSVs are often used. PDFs are used to do presentations for clients and managers, CSV to play with their data in a custom spreadsheet or follow performance over time across campaigns.

Solutioning

In the early exploration phase I tried different ideas.

By working closely with stakeholders and listening to customer feedback, I identified the most practical solutions that balanced impact with development effort. Some early ideas were deprioritised for the first version, like benchmarking against historical averages, funnel analysis and content improvement suggestions.

This helped us focus on delivering a final solution that offered strong value without unnecessary complexity.

The primary idea I focused on for the redesign was to reduce cognitive load and simplify the user experience through progressive disclosure.

I created a main page showcasing all the top-level metrics. Each main metric includes a ‘details’ button that leads to a secondary page with more detailed information, additional metrics and breakdowns. These subpages can also be accessed through tabs, allowing easy navigation between them.

In order to simplify follow-up for marketers, we’ve incorporated various breakdowns such as geography, domains, contact lists and segments. Each line of the breakdown includes a ‘View contacts’ button. This allows for easy loading of a specific group of contacts into the contact segmentation tool with just one click.

For the eCommerce business we added a revenue tab, allowing them to follow revenue and performance from their campaigns. Key eCommerce metrics are available, such as average cart value and number of first-time buyers.

On all breakdowns we have export buttons, so the data can be downloaded as CSV and added to a spreadsheet for further analysis.

Launch strategy

We used a soft launch to ease into the redesign of this critical page. A toggle let users try the new version and switch back if needed. This gave us time to gather feedback and make improvements. A month later, we fully transitioned.

The result: we got only two support messages , both positive. No complaints.

Impact

After the final release I followed the popular HEART framework to define key UX metrics and continuously measure the performance of the new version:

• Happiness was measured with a survey popup on Userpilot. We got 84% of positive votes and 57% five stars.
• 33% of people navigated to Segmentation to see the the contacts behind an action, compared to 27% before the redesign. That’s an engagement improvement of 22%.
• Another indicator of improved engagement, was the list of most clicked items on the new page: list of contacts behind an action, metrics details, previewing the email content, etc, all of these are value-bringing content related clicks. On the old page people mostly used to navigate away to the homepage, to the list of campaigns or other destinations.
• In terms of task success the ability to export all data tables and breakdowns improved the exporting task 6.6 times: from 0.78% to 5.16% of page visitors. 5.71% of all visitors switched the breakdowns to table view so they can have access to the raw data behind each visualisation (map, chart, etc.)

Aside from Happiness everything else was measured via a dedicated Fullstory dashboard.

Lessons learned

• There are two ways to battle complexity: break the big, scary thing into smaller, more manageable pieces, and apply systems thinking to abstract the structure from the building blocks — this way it’s both easier to build and to use.
• Analytics pages are a special kind of page, where traditional user flows will not help much. These are data-heavy pages with very simple and flat interactions; there’s really nothing worth mapping in a flow. I tried and it didn’t lead to any valuable structure.
• When measuring UX impact, focus on the metrics that matter. For this project, adoption and retention depend heavily on the campaigns sent, so I decided not to measure them.

One more thing…

I worked on this redesign with a framework mindset from the start. Everything I did was highly modular and scalable.

In the second half of 2024 I turned the new design into a library — a miniature design system with it’s own components, patterns and guidelines to enable the same solution to be used for other marketing channels, like SMS, Whatsapp, Push, etc.

This greatly multiplied the impact of my solution, improved consistency and reduced design debt and development cost across the platform.

The dev implementation of the email campaign report took 4 months. With the new library the redesigned SMS report was released after only two sprints.

Follow me on Linkedin for more design wisdom.

From metrics to meaning: A product design case study on Brevo campaign reports was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Shockwaves of despair are coursing through the design community (on Reddit here and here) as people worry about how long it will take for UX designers to become obsolete and potentially lose their jobs.

I think we’ll be alright. Let me explain why…

To excel in any creative activity, you need skills that can be categorized into two main groups: technical skills and strategic skills. Of course, there are a bunch of other things, like soft skills, communication, emotional intelligence, etc. However, technical and strategic are the two main groups for me.

This applies for design, music, writing, drawing, photography, etc.

Technical skills are your ability to work with the tools of the craft, to manufacture the artifacts you’re creating. In our case, this would be Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, etc.

Designers with good technical skills know how any piece of design is built just by examining it. They know which font is used, what’s the border radius, which design patterns were applied and why, gradient style or even blending mode, etc. They can sit on their computer and create anything.

But the big question is…

What to create?

Strategic skills are defined by your ability to solve problems, and by this, I mean solving the right problem in the right way to achieve the business objectives.

If technical skills are about knowing how to manufacture things, strategic skills are about knowing exactly what to manufacture in order to be impactful.

This is, of course, extremely complex. That’s why, over the years, we designers have developed a process, including discovery and user research, countless workshops, activities, diagrams, journey maps, etc. to make sure we are solving something worth solving.

In all creative fields the technical skills are the foundation. Strategic skills is what makes you successful.

What does this have to do with AI?

I think AI will dramatically democratize technical skills. Everyone could type what they want and it would appear magically on their screen. But nothing will change.

Look around and tell me? What products do you buy? The pretty ones or the useful ones?

The strategic skills are what counts. That’s what makes great products, that’s what we are getting paid for.

Nowadays everyone has a device that can type. Same devices that the great books of our time are written on. How many people write bestselling books, how many people impact the world through writing? Very, very few. It’s exactly the same.

Keep working on upping your research game, keep talking to users, keep testing and validating everything, keep following the right process and you’ll be fine.

We’re all going to be fine, because I am perfectly capable of typing the Harry Potters books, but I am totally uncapable of writing the Harry Potter books.

After the technical part of our work is democratized and anyone can do it the strategic thinking educated and experienced designers have will become even more valuable.

Follow me on Twitter for more design wisdom

AI can now build interfaces and that’s great for designers was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Culled from nearly 320,000 entries from more than 200 countries, the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards have announced their shortlist of winners. We’ve selected highlights from several categories, ranging from architecture and travel to contemporary issues and portraiture. Winners will be announced on April 19th.

Images courtesy of the World Photography Organization. Article was originally found on Colossal.

Highlights from the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards Shortlist was originally published in Framed Light on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bruce wanted to document everyday life of the local gangsters. He gained the confidence by buying them food and, of course alcohol. “They all live in the dark decaying village communities. The basis of their life — vodka and violence “- he says.

For more of his photo projects visit the author’s website.

Russian gangsters was originally published in Framed Light on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ukrainian photographer Yevhen Kotenko started photographing the bench visible from his kitchen window in 2007. “I didn’t give myself any time limits or goals, I just went to the kitchen and looked out the window. Usually there was something to see” he told RFE/RL.

“The worst thing was seeing people I went to school with drinking on this bench, then crawling home like reptiles. I was scared that if I went outside, I’d become one of them” the author said.

The story was originally posted on BoredPanda and RadioFreeEurope.

This is what you get if you photograph the same park bench for 10 years was originally published in Framed Light on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For more images you can follow me here on Medium, or on Instagram and 500px. Cheers.

Double stairs was originally published in Framed Light on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here are my favourite shots from the series. You can visit Urban Saints on facebook for more. The author’s website is here.

Urban Saints was originally published in Framed Light on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Elia and his wife Naomi live the location independent life for years. This means they have no permanent place to call home. They just move all the time from one place to another.

Read more about Locardi’s mobile lifestyle in this recent article on the Travel and Leisure magazine.

The photos above are from Elia’s 2016 year in review blog post on his awesome blog called Blame The Monkey which I highly recommend. Enjoy.

Travelling the World Full Time was originally published in Framed Light on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

She has visited an astounding 181 countries, and is eager to check all 196 off of her list — a feat that would make her the first female, youngest American, and fastest individual to do so. Deemed Expedition 196, this passion project exhibits De Pecol’s empowering jet-setting journey.

With only 15 countries and less than 40 days to go, De Pecol is in the homestretch of her project. As Expedition 196 comes to a close, be sure to keep up with her through her uplifting Instagram and her travel-inspired Twitter!

Original story was posted on MyModrenMet.

First Female to Visit Every Country on Earth was originally published in Framed Light on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Story was originally published by MMM.

Ballet And The City was originally published in Framed Light on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.