UI/UX
Flock is an online collaboration and messaging platform that solves workplace communication needs. Flock has a powerful suite of business collaboration tools which enhance user productivity.
Mailcast provides mailing list functionality within Flock channels. It enables users to easily send important memos or project update emails with just a click, without having to remember and type numerous email addresses. For every channel, you’re given a unique email id to reach out to every participant of the group via mail. From creating your own mailing list to managing them, you can do much more with Mailcast.
Started from research, conceptualising the flows to creating the visual design and communicating the interaction to developers.
Due to the instant casual nature of chats mails are still popular for essential communication and form an important part of any organisation. Without mailcast feature, the user journey of creating a mailing list was long. The creator had to collect the email addresses of all channel members, save title & description for mailing list, communicate appropriately about the mailing list.
| Chats | Mails |
|---|---|
| Limited to a single platform. No cross platform exchange. | Can work across different platforms.Easy cross platform exchange. |
| Preferable for communication within the organisation. | Preferable for people external to the organisation. |
| Used for casual communication. Decays easily. | Yes. The last interacted threads are shown at the top. |
In order to empathize with the users we started by talking to them, understanding how they communicate with team members and gathered their pain points.
After understanding their actions, feelings, pain points and desired outcomes we went ahead to write the user stories
1. When hr wants to send out announcements to a specific group of people, has to go through the painful process of selecting everyone’s email addresses and making a mailing list.
2. When an IT admin has to manage mailing lists for different people, has to spend lot of time in the custom settings and making sure every member has adequate rights.
We decided to go ahead with a full-fledged interface to cater to the requirements, accommodate all features including admin controls and added a hook from the messenger through the chat tab buttons
Allowing users to manually create mailing lists, allow editing existing mailing lists, subscribe/unsubscribe to custom mailing lists, admin controls, allowing guest members to be part of mailing lists
High fidelity wireframes were made to resolve the existing problems.
1. Mailcast was pre installed to integrate mailing list functionality into Flock.
2. Creating a mailing list as simple as adding a name and description. Users could add people from their team. Creator automatically subscribed to it.
3. Admins could edit, delete and deactivate mailing lists created by them.
4. Users could unsubscribe any mailing list - if they didn’t want to receive emails about a project they’re no longer a part of.
To validate the use cases and the improvements, we conducted multiple rounds of usability tests to understand the problem areas of our solution and get user feedback.
Deriving from the usability test, peer reviews we made the UI design
