MailChimp UX Team: Collaboration [Part 2 of the Book]

[ Tl; dr ]

[ 1st part of the book ]
[ 3rd part of the book ]
[ 4th part of the book ]
[ 5th part of the book ]
[ 6th part of the book ]
[ 7th part of the book ]
[ 8th part of the book ]
')

All hands on deck!

June Lee

Many cultures include an initiation rite when elders welcome newcomers. Such rites are usually filled with camaraderie and devotion to common goals. For many MailChimp employees, including me, the dedication ceremony was working in a technical support team.

Employees of this division of the company undergo training, work closely with mentors and together solve many problems and tasks.
With 7 million users and thousands of newcomers arriving daily, you need to constantly increase the number of employees in the technical support team. We took advantage of this not only from the point of view of directly improving the quality of customer service, but also to train employees in other divisions of the company.

For example, if we need someone in the UX team, we start looking for a candidate among the guys working in the technical support team. Similarly, this path led me to the position of a design researcher.

At some point, we noticed an increase in the queue of customers who had consulted for technical support, which made us jittery. Taking into account the fact that at that time a whole group of newcomers had just joined the technical support team, we decided to hold a general meeting. All the staff of this team, including those who went to work in other departments of the company, were invited to collaborate with customer requests.

An ordinary working day essentially turned into a meeting of a large family, united with one goal.

As the company grows, it is very important for us to preserve the values ​​that were laid in the activities of the MailChimp team at the very beginning of its journey. We understand the importance of investing in the social aspect of our work - regular joint lunches and socializing after work, playing table tennis, billiards and just chatting over a cup of coffee.

All of these are components of our company’s identity, but general meetings are especially energizing. On this day, we managed to get rid of all the calls, and the track You're The Best Around sounded throughout the office. Few things can bring people together as well as working together and achieving a common goal.

Seeking help from colleagues

Fernando Godina

The MailChimp team has a wide variety of specialists from all over the world. Someone received a degree, and someone - self-taught. We are biologists, advertising specialists, rhetoric experts, industrial designers, artists and poets. Our team speaks a dozen different languages, and we are very different people, but it is in these differences that our strength lies, which manifests itself in joint work. We have something in common - we love to carefully analyze the problems and solve several issues at once.

I understood all this from the very beginning of work, but I was convinced of these conclusions in practice. Our UX-team worked on three different projects, the deadlines of which are rapidly approaching. Researchers conducted several parallel surveys that required sending thousands of messages to customers. Designers and developers made up one of the latest issues of our UX-mailing list, and the researchers helped them. We worked with all our might, but obviously we could not handle everything on our own. There was only one way to complete all the work on time - to seek help from our colleagues.

Pass the baton

Working on research with the participation of clients using our Mandrill email delivery service, together with Larissa Wolfram-Gvas, we were looking for a way to incorporate merge tags into the body of our questionnaire. They were required to broadcast MailChimp customer data in the format of a SurveyMonkey survey service. Faced with difficulties in the process of solving this problem, we turned for help to colleagues from the research team, who in a fairly short time helped us set up the transfer of metadata.

In the process of launching mailings to thousands of our clients, we noticed some inaccuracies in the code, once again attracted colleagues, but in the end we had to turn to Fabio Carneiro , a developer who specializes in working with letter templates. The task, which took an hour of our time, was solved by Fabio in just a couple of minutes.

We did not waste time on resolving an issue outside our area of ​​competence, but simply turned to one of the specialists, which ultimately significantly reduced the time to solve the problem.

In the meantime, part of the UX team was working on the next release of our UX mailing , which had to be edited and put in proper form. This task was successfully closed by our researcher and designer, even though in the end they missed one minor typo.
Understanding the level of expertise and specialization of our colleagues, we can count on a smoother flow of work processes, intercepting each other’s tasks. Of course, this makes work a lot easier and more enjoyable.

Do not close yourself from others

That day we worked on three parallel projects, and two qualities helped us a lot: openness to communication and mutual assistance. If someone faced problems, they wrote to other team members using an instant messenger, or simply approached them with a particular question, and the process of searching for possible solutions immediately began. Each such appeal was perceived with a sincere desire to understand the problem and help a colleague.

Even if someone was very busy at the time of receipt of a question from another employee, he would find a minute to report that his detailed answer would have to wait some time, or simply conveyed the question to a less busy colleague. Regardless of the complexity of the situation, we never got stuck on solving problems — work on projects moved forward.

Each of the UX-team specializes in a particular subject, but does not close from the others. This approach is adopted throughout the company, it allows us to solve a variety of tasks, using the power of our team. When it comes to improving MailChimp, we don’t hesitate to ask for help.

Fair work

Gregg Bernstein

A lawyer, a content specialist, a developer, a designer and a researcher come to the gym ... Well, this is not one of those not very successful jokes, but just a story about how we tried to make the description of MailChimp services clearer.

Legal information is usually prepared in order to protect the interests of clients and minimize risks, and not at all for ease of use of services. Of course, now this situation is changing, but changes in the conditions of use of some services cause an angry reaction from users, and companies are devoting more and more time to bringing this documentation into a form that is understandable to users.

The MailChimp team is respectful of all materials available for viewing by our customers. In 2013, Kate Kiefer Lee , our content specialist, and Valerie Warner Danin , our lawyer, decided it was time to revise the design of the terms for using MailChimp services. According to this initiative, our UX-team, legal department and marketing department started developing templates for legal documentation of all our businesses, including TinyLetter and Mandrill.

Each of us has brought something of our own to this work. I relied on simplicity, based on my experience in the UX field, Valerie made sure that the interests of the company were taken into account, and Kate focused on our style of presentation . Together we come to the following set of recommendations.

Do not complicate

Editing the terms of use of our services, we thought about expressing them in a language understandable to the common man, because they are intended for him. Of course, we could not completely get rid of the special terminology - such words as “vouch and represent”, but Katie and Valerie excluded from our documentation all the “established procedures” and “as a result”.

In addition to achieving a certain level of simplicity, we needed to get away from the humorous presentation of the material, which we often resort to while working on other sections of MailChimp. Terms of use is a serious thing, and here you need to be able to look at the results of your work through the eyes of a client who wants to get acquainted with the official documentation, and not just laugh at another joke of our colleagues.

Put on legibility

Trying to move away from legal jargon, we refused to write any phrases or sentences in capital letters. Such text usually gives the impression that you are shouted this information, and we would not want to get such an effect from our legal documentation. Instead of capital letters, we used bold.

In addition, we increased the font size, indents between paragraphs, and actively used bulleted and numbered lists. There is nothing super-scientific in this - just a neat design.



Structure the content

Intuitive grouping and layout with respect to the hierarchy will help the reader quickly find the relevant sections without having to search all the document body. There is nothing special in this at first glance, but this solution helps a great deal to solve user problems, for example, deal with who owns the rights to the content created in the process of using services.

As a result, we have segmented the sections of our documentation, determined taking into account which legal information our clients access most often, and which services (for example, API) they [sections] cover.

We have developed a so-called “legal landing page”, on which all these sections are collected in a form that is understandable for perception.

Ask for help from colleagues.

Having simplified the approach to the presentation of the material and making it more legible, we defined sections that could still seem to our customers not very intelligible. For them, we brought additional comments opposite each of the points. Their goal is not just sammari, but context formation with relevant examples. We used a similar approach in another project - Email Genome Project .

Having dealt with the recommendations on the design of materials, we attracted to the work of our art director David Sizemore and font-end developer Stephen Sloan . David prepared the design and icons, and Stephen figured out the hints design options.

Of course, the MailChimp terms of use page looks at a relatively small number of our customers, but this does not mean that it does not deserve a careful and careful attitude towards itself. As a result, by working together, we managed to bring an absolutely unreadable text into an organized and easy to understand form.

[ Translation of the third part of the book The UX Reader]