Improving Usability Without Losing Functionality
Klaviyo is a marketing platform that makes it easy for businesses to build personal relationships with their customers.
With Flows, users send their subscribers the right message at the right time through a series of automated steps triggered by an event. While Flows is a powerful tool, it wasn't always easy to use – especially for small businesses that didn't have the time and dedicated resources.
Company
Klaviyo
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
June – September 2022
Snapshot of the Flows interface with a built-out abandoned cart automation
Problem
When Flows was originally conceived, the goal was to make the product highly functional to satisfy the needs of a handful of enterprise and agency customers who were certified Klaviyo power users.
The tradeoff that came with making this tool so powerful was complexity. For non-power users, particularly the small business and entrepreneur subset, Flows was often too difficult to set up and understand.
In order to ensure all of our users were able to get the most out of Flows, we took on the following challenge: Improve the usability of Flows for non-power users without compromising the power and functionality that power users needed.
Research Phase
Strategy Overview
To uncover exactly why entrepreneurs and small business users were struggling with Flows, we used both qualitative and quantitative resources.
Product metrics helped pinpoint bottlenecks in the existing flow. Support tickets and community forums gave us more insight into why users were getting hung up at each step. Finally, we were able to see and hear about the pain points firsthand through user interviews.
Together, these resources helped us narrow our scope of work and ensure we were solving the right problems.
Research Summary
Final Designs
The three major problem areas above correspond to subsequent stages in the ideal user journey: 1. Build the automation, 2. test it before launching, and 3. evaluate performance. Mirroring this in the product made sense, so we added a toggle at the top of the tool so users could focus on the most relevant stage at a given time and switch to the next one when ready.
For the build stage, we added guidance on empty areas of the canvas as well as contextual help depending on where the user was in the process. For testing, we gave users the ability to simulate the automation using actual subscribers to see how they would move through it when activated. Finally, we added more granular analytics so users could understand not just how the automation was performing, but also individual steps within it.
1. Build with canvas clues and contextual help
Canvas clues, aka messages in otherwise empty areas in the tool, nudge new users in the right direction (without interrupting expert users).
2. Test to make sure the flow is set up correctly
Testing is a net-new feature for users who want to simulate how their automation works before turning it on and actually messaging their subcribers.
3. Analyze performance and optimize
Build mode focuses on content and the flow of actions. Analyze mode was added so users could focus on evaluating performance of active flows.
