During my time working on native mobile (both iOS and Android) at Mailchimp, I had the opportunity to work on bringing Tags for contacts onto the platform. Tagging was a major feature within the suite of features that comprised Mailchimp’s (ver new at the time) CRM offering. While we thought there were strong use cases for customers wanting to tag their newly added contacts in a mobile setting, this project was more aimed at feature parity across platforms.
When I was first handed the project, it needed a very quick turn around. This was due to the fact the Tags was already scheduled to be released on the web application during a marketing event that Mailchimp was taking part in. As such, I needed to break this feature up into phases.
The first phase was aimed purely at visibility. In other words, a mobile user would be able to see what tags each of their contacts had, but they wouldn’t be able to alter the tags or create new ones. We made the first phase this simple so that we could get the feature out the door to meet the aggressive deadline.
The second phase was where we brought in Tag management and creation. At one point we thought we were going to split management and creation up into two separate releases. This was due in large part to API and backend work that we needed to get done before creation would be possible on the mobile application. Here’s a look at some of the early work we did and the flows / error states on iOS. In addition to clickable prototypes, I often like to lay a flow out sequentially so that the team has better context for how all the steps relate.
While thankfully we didn’t wind up taking this route, our user research resources on the team were stretched pretty thin. This meant we weren’t going to be able to get any real users in to test out our solutions. That was a scary thought and it meant we had to get scrappy. Thank goodness I had an awesome researcher to work with. He was able to source employees that were also mobile users. These folks helped us user test the different iterations as we narrowed in on the final solution. For these tests, I built a clickable prototype in Principle and deployed it to a test device we had on hand. We would the users simple prompts like, “How would you add a tag to this contact’s profile? Can you try to do that and talk us through it?” We used Zoom’s mobile screen recording and audio capturing to record the results. Here’s a look at the Principle prototype.
While these were scrappy user tests, they helped us uncover some vital usability issues that we were able to address before shipping the feature. One of the issues was that the presence of the Save button was confusing when they were entering a new tag. They weren’t clear as to whether it would save the Tag they were creating since there was a separate action in the view allowing them to Create a tag. The other issue was that we weren’t doing a great job of distinguishing the newly created Tags from the existing tags. The users in testing were having trouble finding the tags they had just created. Below are the updated views based on that feedback.
