During some down time between release cycles in 2018 I was able to work on something that had been floating around in my head for a while. At the time, Mailchimp was on a spree of adding marketing channels to the product. In our native mobile applications, when you would drill into a campaign of any type (email, ad, postcard, etc) that view would be called the campaign detail view. Each marketing channel had its own campaign detail view. Each view had its own quirks and nuances. For instance, some details view would only allow you to push into a child view while others would allow you call a child view with a modal for a softer context switch. These were all quirks that you just kinda came to know about if you worked on the application long enough.

So what I wanted to do was establish one detail view that could be used for all of our existing channels as well as those that didn’t exist yet. I started by normalizing what all of the elements of the detail view could be. This included things like a content thumbnail, campaign options (table cells), reporting / vanity metrics quick view, status and call to action.

This wasn’t something I was able to get on our roadmap but it was a fun and insightful explore nonetheless. Here’s the system applied to an Ad Detail View.