Educents – Transactional Emails

Project Timeline

1.5 week

Platform

Web

Role

UX/UI Designer

Intro

Educents is an online marketplace that brings individual content creators, small businesses, ed tech companies, and publishers together. With an engaged community of educators and parents, the Educents platform enables access to innovative and fun educational products for the classroom and home-based education. Educents has since been acquired. 

My role

I was the lead designer for this project. I collaborated with the customer support team, development team, and marketing team.

Problem

Since the creation of Educents, transactional emails were left on the back burner as the company focused on handling the rapid growth of including shippable products.

Order confirmation email

Text-heavy and irrelevant information

  1. File name and SKU is included
  2. Gives the impression that the email is “unfinished”.
Shipped order email

Design is inconsistent

  1. This design was an email template and was unable to customize to our needs
Purchased voucher/
subscription email

Lack of typographic hierarchy

  1. Unclear of what product is purchased
  2. Inconsistent line breaks

Users

The demographic is mostly the semi-tech savvy mom who has a general understanding of what kind of product they’re purchasing and the majority of our users access Educents on a mobile device.

The Homeschooling Mom

“As a homeschool teacher, I want to know if I downloaded a digital product so I can be better prepared for my lesson plans.”

The Mom

“As a mom, I want to easily identify what I have purchased because I don’t have time to look through my emails with my busy schedule.”

Goals

Distinguish the product type

The company was in the midst of increasing shippable products and products need to be labeled and reiterating delivery methods have to be clear and concise.

Create brand consistency

Creating brand consistency will reduce technical debt while increasing user experience and getting repeat customers.

Process

I began by working with the customer support team to see if there are any customer pain points.

“I didn’t know I had to print these worksheets myself.”
“I thought I would be getting actual worksheets, not PDFs.”
“I didn’t know I had to contact the seller to get my free trial subscription for this app.
Redesigning with purpose

This revealed that not only did the emails need a redesign but the root of the problem actually begins when a customer is browsing.

Quick userflow
  1. Browse Educents
  2. View product
  3. Add to cart
  4. Purchase product
  5. Receive order confirmation
  6. Receive product via mail, email, etc.

Educents’ 3 types of products that they carry: A physical shipped product, a digital product, and a voucher/subscription. 

Though sellers receive guidelines on how to list their products on Educents, sometimes product photos can be misleading and product descriptions aren’t detailed enough.

After working with the customer support team, the #1 priority was to label products with a corresponding icon on product pages and in transactional emails involving products.

Competitive Analysis

To quicken the process of the revamp, I looked to Etsy’s transactional emails for inspiration. Etsy had commonalities with Educents in that Etsy also sells different types of products:

Prioritizing needed changes

While keeping in mind code feasibility and scalability, I set out to prioritize what changes needed to be made:

  1. Distinguish the type of product
  2. Short and concise text
  3. Add a CTA button
  4. Add seller information

A glaring difference I noticed was that Educents’ emails did not have a CTA button. This was clearly a missed opportunity to drive users back to Educents website. We also did not provide any reminder about the seller the customer purchased from.

Adding the seller’s instructions was considered in the design but due to time implementation constraints, it will be revisited in the future.

Ideation

At this stage, I prioritized getting a visual of how adding icons to their corresponding product would feel.

Early iteration

Order confirmation email

Here is a sneak peek of an early iteration. I collaborated with the marketing team to rewrite the delivery method text and tested the corresponding icons. As well as making sure the design can be easily implemented. It was thought that the section should take precedence over the order summary but when the design was viewed on mobile, users would have to scroll quite a bit to see the main purpose of the email, which was to view what they had just ordered.

The “view order” button was not scalable and would only be true to orders containing one item.

Final Design

Order confirmation email

We wanted to remind our users that Educents is a marketplace of sellers. I’ve added multiple links to encourage our users to communicate with sellers. A visual of what product was also added. Though the older design had a way for users to directly download their product from the email, driving users back to the Educents website was prioritized. Also added an indicator of what type of product they have purchased.

Shipped order email

The product type indicator was omitted because only physical items can only be shipped. A small section about the seller was added in order to encourage users to get to know the seller, be it a well-known brand or a small business.

Purchased voucher/subscription email

Now with clear segmented sections for multiple purchases in one order and visuals of what product was purchased.

Reflection

I learned so much in such a little amount of time as I had no prior UI/UX experience. My main job was a graphic designer on the marketing team and I was surprised by the similarities and distinctions between marketing and UX. It was a struggle at first to create a good balance of the two but I had a lot of fun figuring out solutions.

Future

-The discoverability of other products should be considered for future designs in order to increase sales.

-Due to time constraints, A/B testing would have helped a great deal on which design worked best to lower customer complaints.