Ignite — An email client UX Case Study
Introduction
On October 29th 1969, the first message was sent from computer to computer on ARPANET.
It became the email as we all know it today, It is a very comfortable means of communication especially among professionals and working-class because it is extremely fast, cheap and can reach a lot of people when you hit the send button, but it quickly turned to a place where marketers hit you with their products and overwhelm you with their newsletters.
I was tasked to design an emailing client called Ignite. Ignite is a minimalistic email client that gives you control over the organization of your mails.
- An email client that helps people focus on what’s important.
- The dashboard is a minimalist view that lets you quickly see what’s important in your inbox and clean up the rest.
- All new emails are smartly categorized into personal, notifications and newsletters.
- Email threads are arranged in a simple format that’s easy to understand.
- Snooze an email to get back to it when the time is right.
- Powerful search module that makes it easy to find emails.
- Schedule Emails.
Process
Users Survey
I started my interview by setting up a form, a simple google form to understand challenges people face when using their local emails (Those things are almost perfect). I used a google form because it adheres to the social distancing guidelines and also I would reach more email users through a link.
With this survey, I was able to gather information and understand the user’s pain points. The form contained 13 short questions, The form was answered by 22people.
Affinity Diagram
I asked what issues they were having with your current mailing platform and what feature they would like to see.
Based on the results from the questions above, I developed an affinity diagram to understand and notice patterns.
From the survey and intercepts, I found out that:
- Users read newsletters if they find it attracting even if they are not sure how it got there.
- Users want to have control over the organization of their mails.
- Users want to be able to trust accounts which mails may have been sent to the spam.
- Users want a neat email thread view on their mobile phones.
User Persona
I generated a User Persona form my intercepts and surveys to bring a prospective user of this product to live.
Visual Design
Ignite is a minimalistic email client so I decided to use very few colours and fonts.
Wireframe
Here a few ideas I was getting of how the overall interface may look like.
Implementations
This was how I was able to solve the problems through design
Organization: Users should be able to move emails to a certain section and if a sender ever sends emails again from that same email address it lands in the same section.
Email Threads: Emails from the same senders are very accessible and properly organized in a familiar thread view.
