In last week’s announcement of a new UI for sending drafts, I dropped a little bit of foreshadowing:
We've got a couple more changes planned this summer for the "previewing and sending" flow, and we promise that our goal is to make sure we keep everyone's use case in mind. Sometimes you have to move a couple buttons to make an omelet, as the saying goes — but we take such decisions seriously, with the goal of making sure we can provide the best interface possible over the next decade.
If you’ve sent an email in the past few days, you probably now know what this was referring to: a whole new way of reviewing and finalizing your email before you send it.
We’ve moved the various modals in the bottom (tags, audience, scheduling) into a new drawer that pops up when you hit send. At a high level, our goal with this design was to shift from what abstractly felt like rummaging around in your kitchen drawers trying to find the right utensil into a more cohesive flow: you write, then you review, then you choose your subscribers, and finally you hit send.
We don’t like changing big things for no reason, and this is a big change. It also feels like a correct change, and I want to ground it in three large pain points that are now solved:
- Our single biggest question from customers sending their first email is “I scheduled something but it never went out. What happened?” This was because the modal for “scheduling” an email was disjoint from the actual sending of the email.
- Our very helpful reviewing pane — that informs you about missing links, problematic phrases, broken tags, and so on — only showed up in a dialog, so if you wanted to actually see that your fixes worked you’d have to click out of the popup, change the thing, go back into the dialog, and repeat ad nauseum.
- Our tag and ‘recipients’ filters — the two ways you constrain to whom an email might be going — were in completely separate routes.
All of which is to say: we know new interfaces take some time. We think we made the right decisions with this one, but always love your feedback. (And, we promise, we’re almost done futzing with stuff.)