2022 / website
Refreshing a product and everything that goes with it at MailerLite
Most UX case studies focus on one isolated feature. Yet growth comes not from perfection in one area but from a coherence across every facet of your product. For more than two years, I worked with dev, product, and marketing teams to design and launch new features, strategize marketing campaigns, and unify our brand voice through the first ever design system and brand guidelines created at MailerLite.
Here is a sampling of a few of the many projects that I worked on.
Role: UX design and CRO
produced at: in-house design team
I joined MailerLite to finalize a complete overhaul of the product. One of the key features that originally set ML apart from it's competitors was its drag-&-drop editor, the first in the email marketing industry.
Research told us that many users were confused by the layout of the components within the refactored builder - a point of major friction. We drastically redesigned the editor UI to solve these issues, and added a simplified AI Subject Line generator that became one of our fastest-adopted features.
Following the release of our updated product, we moved on to our 4-year-old web experience. The website update was a complete overhaul of how we marketed MailerLite.
We decided to rebuild the experience on the latest version of Statamic, a laravel-based CMS, allowing us to create a fresh codebase and rethink every interaction.
Using Statamic gave use the flexibility to create custom components that our team could use to quickly build their own pages with a visual builder. Although still at the start of my development journey, I was able to design, iterate on, and develop one of our key new Community features, the Wall of Love.
The final product is easy to update and manage for our community team members, and maintained our clean, simple-solution-first design ethos. To this date, the page is regularly updated by members of non-dev teams without issue.
Post-launch, we moved on to the next step in our growth-focused design updates. Alongside my PM, I founded the first CRO team at MailerLite. Together we created a consistent process for conducting website-visitor research and synthesizing it into experiments.
Within the first year, we found that our tiny CRO team had produced outsize gains when it came to both new signups and plan upgrades.
The final step in our redesign of MailerLite was to create guidelines that anyone could follow. In 2020, the ML team rapidly grew from a twenty person team to more than a hundred. Through the first ten years of business, the mindset around design was summed up in this stakeholder quote, "Good designers don't need brand guidelines."
When I joined the team in early 2021, it was clear that this mindset - coupled with rapid growth - had created multiple, fast-growing issues around design consistency, resulting in hundreds of hours of consistent revisions and wasted time. After interviewing multiple team members, it was discovered that different PM's even gave different responses about what the brand was, what it looked like, and who it was for.
There was no source of truth.
To solve this problem, I orchestrated large-scale meetings between marketing, design, and product to discuss, argue, and distill just who MailerLite was and why.
These conversations were used to create the first set of brand guidelines created for MailerLite. The brand book that was designed based on these guidelines is now used company-wide and is sent to all affiliates and collaborators.
While this may seem more a task for a brand designer, the same UX principles that we used to guide the direction of the product were used here; interviews with team members allowed us to create guidelines and design tools that could benefit them. Brand guidelines, and the planning around them, are as much a part of a growth strategy as any experimentation framework or analytics tool.
Some of the most important tasks of a growth designer are those that fall into the category of improving processes and streamlining design frameworks to the point that they disappear and become second-nature for the entire team.
My time at MailerLite taught me the value of being able to work cross-team to create a unified whole. After launch, we saw an immediate and consistent uptick in growth with the new MailerLite quickly outpacing the legacy version.
Although a great product comes first, growth comes from using UX insights to not only build user-focused features, but to lead everything from your copywriting to your website design. As a growth-focused UX designer, I believe it is my duty to fill many shoes. Marketing strategy one day, experimentation frameworks the next, with a bit of design systems and dev thrown in for good measure.
Brilliant products deserve brilliant marketing and equally brilliant design. This is only achieved through holistic thinking and a willingness to listen to your users.
I believe great design is ethical. Why? Because design is the practice of deliberately focusing on, and responding to, your users' needs. Those needs change. You change, too. Now let's design a growth plan that doesn't feel deceitful and make the internet just a little bit better through honesty and empathy.
Email me about a project.
Consulting with the MailerLite team in Istanbul.
“Cody is my favorite UX designer that I have worked with. A great design thinker, combining creativity, business strategy and attention to detail, all in one. What's also great about Cody is his mannerism on receiving feedback and turning this into solutions one can actually work with - he's incredible with deadlines and honest with what can and cannot work.”