Experiment with email integration

Role

UX lead supporting an agile team of 4

Timeline

4 months

How might we make Symphony the only communication platform enterprise customers need?

Problem motivation

Integrating email into Symphony is critical to a unified workflow, eliminating the need to switch tools and capturing all key insights in one place.

User interviews to understand pain points

Integrating email into chat-centric Symphony presented challenges due to communication differences. User interviews highlighted key issues:

  • constant email monitoring

  • fragmented information that’s different to search and share

  • high noise to signal ratio in emails

Concept exploration

As email in Symphony is a brand new concept, I started out analyzing the relationship between emails and the other Symphony entities. I then created high level concepts to evaluate with the team to align on a MVP direction.

Building the MVP

I led user story mapping to help the team gain alignment on the set of MVP features. Our goal was to validate the hypothesis that having email integrated into Symphony will make it easier for users to manage their communication and share insights. We iterated quickly based on findings from research using the prototypes I built.

Diary study led to valuable insights

To validate our MVP hypothesis, I partnered with research to run a 2-week diary study to see how people’s email behavior is affected by having emails integrated with Symphony. We were looking for:

  1. A decrease in the frequency with which users access their email client

  2. An increase in productivity due to less context switching

Although we weren’t able to complete our diary study because of reasons external to the project, the MVP was made available for internal users to dogfood. We had valuable learnings from this project to inform the long term product strategy for a unified communication platform.