Optimizing confirmation emails

I led the content design strategy to overhaul the experience of Expedia transactional email templates, beginning with purchase confirmation emails. These email templates are used across all Expedia lines of business.

Timeline

May 2023 to present

Problem

An average purchase confirmation email contains over 500 words. Additionally, related information is scattered throughout the email. This makes key information difficult to scan and leads to cognitive load.

Team structure

  • 1 Content designer (me)

  • 3 UX designers

  • 1 Product manager

  • Legal team

  • Engineering team

My objectives

  • Help users more easily find key information about their booking

  • Align with the needs of content creators across the company

The process

Discovery

To better understand user pain points and needs, we conducted card sorting and a competitive analysis.

Card sorting

We worked with user research to develop a card sorting test that asked users to rank information within an email from least to most important. I helped identify the words used in the activity. Results revealed that users found core booking information to be the most important. This validated our hypothesis that the primary job of a purchase email is to help travelers confirm the details of their booking. We also learned that users don’t find promotions as useful, which was unsurprising.

Competitive analysis

Our design team looked at confirmation emails inside and outside of the travel industry. I reviewed the emails to understand content patterns and gain inspiration. Based on this analysis, I identified that companies are simplifying their confirmation emails to only show the most critical information.

We also reviewed secondary research to understand what problems users commonly experience with confirmation emails.

Define

User cases and problem statements

Through a problem analysis from product management, I worked closely with my team to develop problem statements, scenarios, and use cases. We decided to start with simpler use cases that could scale to more complex use cases.

Stakeholder meetings

I organized and met with stakeholders across teams to introduce this work and gain their initial feedback and concerns. We further refined our use cases and plans, based on these conversations. For example, the team working on flights helped us identify the simplest use case for testing.

Meeting with these teams earlier in the process created more collaboration and awareness between our teams. 

Develop

There were many different aspects of the “develop” phase that I juggled throughout our two month timeline.

Content hierarchy

Based on the card sorting insights, we developed a content hierarchy framework that placed important information higher in the email. I also reorganized the scattered information into the relevant section based on topic. Although travelers didn’t find promos very valuable, I considered business needs and placed the promotion content next to related information.

Legal strategy

The email contained a large amount of legal language that was jargony and not always relevant. To better understand what legal information the templates contained, I conducted an audit across all the email templates. Using insights from the competitive analysis and the audit, I proposed a strategy that reorganized the most important information within the email and linked off to additional information.

The legal team didn’t initially approve my first proposal, but I continued to work closely with them to understand their concerns and collaborate on a more user-centric solution.

Alignment across teams

The email templates impacted many different content teams. To create consistency across the email and app/site experience, I partnered closely with content designers and UX designers to leverage their existing content. 

Additionally, I held a critique session with partner teams to gain their feedback, questions, and concerns. I worked with these teams to incorporate their feedback and provide context on our designs from the high-level email experience. I asked for feedback from teams throughout the entire process.

Simplifying content

I worked closely with the UX designers to simplify the content through visual design. After our first iteration, we reduced the content by 40%. 

To push this simplification, I led an activity with the design team where we identified based on user research what content we should keep, link off to, and remove. After this activity, the content was reduced by nearly 70%.

User research

We worked closely with a user researcher to test the overall email strategy. I worked closely with the UX design team to prepare the prototypes. Through our user research we identified that users preferred our simplified version, but wanted more elements of delight. To address this from a content perspective, I next:

  • Explored voice and tone to identify where we could express ourselves more

  • Recommended opportunities for personalized content

Deliver

A/B testing

Currently, we’re working closely with engineers to launch an A/B test of the email. We checked in with engineering throughout the project to check on the feasibility of our solutions. Now, engineering is digging more deeply into our design.

Content guidelines

I’ll create content guidelines that can be used by teams across the company as they use and update the email templates.

Results

The design received positive feedback from leadership, but our team will evaluate its success after receiving the A/B test results.

Challenges

Competing needs

Our email includes promotional content modules from teams across the company. This meant that many teams wanted their modules higher up in the email, due to their specific needs and goals. To address this, we listened openly to their concerns and asked for data to help us understand the business opportunity. We then created a matrix to help us decide which modules should be higher up, based on user, business, and brand needs. 

Legal requirements

The legal team considered the confirmation template to be a medium where they could display all legally-required content. This made it challenging to get legal approval for proposals to simplify the content. I worked very closely with the team to arrive at a solution that meets user needs and complies with legal requirements.