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About the Applicant

More than 5 million people use MailChimp to create, send, and track email newsletters. The MailChimp User Experience team researches, designs, and develops to improve our products for everyone.
MailChimp
UX Research
We combine quantitative data from our application (analytics, feature use and behaviors) with qualitative data gathered through our support teams, feedback channels (email and social media), surveys, and more to see the big picture. All of this data then informs our decisions—we can point to our five personas and know how a change to our app might effect each, or how an iteration might serve an entire class of customers.
When we launched the redesign of MailChimp in 2013, our CEO asked our research team to correlate customer feedback with persona types. He wanted to know who was struggling with our redesigned app, and why. By using our personas, we could identify common problems (the UI changed) with personas (our Administrative Assistant persona, Ada). The personas allowed us to ascribe a rationale to the struggles these customers reported: the Ada persona allots only a few minutes to using our app each week, as she has many other responsibilities. The changes we made to the app slowed Ada down, and forced her to learn new ways of doing routine things. With this knowledge, we were able to tweak our redesign a bit to make actions more intuitive, and we added clearer copy to our knowledge base. Knowing who we were working for allowed us to understand our customer motivations, contexts, and aspirations.
With our persona posters prominently displayed, our different teams can discuss different archetypical customers as they apply to different scenarios. Our support team can say, “Most of our customers are like Ada [a persona], and she might have the training to script API calls.” Then they can tailor their advice to this customer more appropriately. Another example occurred when we redesigned MailChimp. Understanding that most of our personas expressed a need for a more mobile-friendly app gave our redesign direction and scope. We empathized with how our users wanted to work, and were able to provide a workable solution.