Challenge: Design a simple experience for merchants to quickly update images in their tracking pages and emails

Specifics: I was the solo designer, and this project lasted from Oct/Nov 2024 to Now (I’m currently working on final designs). I also conducted the research that led me to pitch this project.

Outcome: This is still a work in progress, but I’ve gotten fantastic feedback from both our users (merchants) and internal stakeholders. Multiple people have said “This is a gamechanger” and “when can I start using this?” We expect that this project will significantly decrease churn (especially in EMEA), increase order conversion for merchants, and dramatically improve merchant satisfaction.

Background on Track and Notify

Two of Narvar’s largest revenue generators are Track (track pages) and Notify (Email), products that merchants use to keep their customers up to date on the status of their packages. While the primary purpose of these tools is to keep customers apprised of package status, they have a nice additional perk: merchants can add marketing assets to these track pages and emails, which encourage customers to make another purchase.

In the past few years, we’ve found that updating these assets frequently (so they’re new and relevant depending on holiday/season/etc) increases the conversion rate, i.e. rate at which a customer clicks on the image and purchases something new. This finding is consistent which changes in merchant behavior - in the past few years, there’s been a stronger desire from them to regularly update image assets.

Managing these assets is quite complex - merchants can have different assets (and page content/layout) based on country, language, customer segment, and package status.

Initial task: as a side project, investigate UX issues with Track & Notify and propose some quick wins

We had heard that updating image assets in the Narvar merchant tooling platform is extremely time consuming and frustrating, as the product was not designed to allow for easy updates. This is especially painful for our global customers, who are often managing a huge number of assets (as they have localized/translated assets for each country).

This project was originally a mini side project, as we didn’t have any engineering allocation. I started by chatting with 5 CSMs to learn more about the problem and identify some quick wins that could improve the customer experience. CSMs are uniquely positioned to give usability feedback since for some customers, it’s the CSMs that are making the updates in our merchant tool (since it’s so painful to use!).

Example quick win 1: Allow merchants to upload new images in a popup in the Track page editor.

Problem this is solving: Uploading images to Narvar and adding metadata (destination URL, alt text, etc) is painful because it takes a long time and can only be done one by one. This is extra painful because they need different versions for mobile and desktop, and different versions for each locale. This also needs to be done on a separate page (not in the Track editor), so merchants lose their context.

Example quick win 2: Allow merchants to link desktop & mobile versions of an image.

Problem this is addressing: currently, these are managed as completely separate assets. They need to be uploaded and assigned to a track page separately, which is tedious.

It was clear to me that quick wins wouldn’t be enough here, so I started designing my proposed solution (campaigns) and conducted extensive merchant research

As soon as I dove in, it was clear that 1) asset management is a huge problem we need to solve and 2) a lightweight quick-win project wouldn’t sufficiently move the needle on merchant pain points.

The business impact of not acting was huge. Because of our UX, customers are churning, we are losing deals, and we have a huge number of help desk tickets (customers asking for help with updating assets). This is especially impacting our larger global retailers, who manage many assets. Customers are also not seeing the asset conversion rates expected with Narvar, since they are not updating assets as frequently as expected — this is a problem for renewals, and impacts the price at which we’re able to sell our products.

By communicating the immense business risk of doing nothing, I was able to successfully get the green light for a full project!

Proposed project: Campaigns

In addition to the quick wins, I also identified a few larger potential solutions that I thought could really move the needle — one of which was Campaigns. My proposed solution was: with a campaign, merchants can easily schedule updates to all of their marketing assets across their Narvar experiences.

This concept got a lot of positive feedback internally, and we started getting traction to embark on a larger project. However, I needed to talk to merchants to better understand their pain points, goals, and whether this would even solve their problem!

A few reasons for why we should prioritize this project

1. Work towards Narvar’s long term product vision of a unified merchant experience.

2. Work towards the Track/Notify team’s vision on decoupling asset management from other track page configurations

3. Enable merchants to make more frequent asset updates, which will in turn increase their Narvar ROI (by increased conversion rates)

The merchant research was extremely informative, and suggested that my campaigns solution would greatly improve merchant outcomes

I spoke with over 10 merchants to better understand their workflows, the tools they use, their success metrics, and much more. I also spoke with 9 CSMs and technical account managers to hear their experiences.

During these sessions, I also got feedback on early designs for Campaigns, which is the concept I was developing in the hopes that we’d be able to embark on a full project.

I’m happy to share my research findings deck live, but in the meantime, here are a few key findings:

1. Campaign manager partially solves user pain points (bulk upload, assigning assets), but creating images is still a pain point.

2. If ecommerce managers could create assets in Narvar, they wouldn’t be reliant on their design teams in order to update track

3. Track and Notify are plagued by bugs and countless usability issues that impact the frequency at which merchants make updates

4. Notify (email) is especially painful to use, since each email template is created and managed separately. If a merchant needs to make an update to a detail (return policy, header formatting, etc), they may need to manually update hundreds of email templates.

I outlined the vision for the future of Track & Notify, which included near-term wins and longer term improvements

I wanted to stress that the campaign manager is not a silver bullet; there are a number of other projects we should invest in as well. Getting a good foundation for Track & Notify is especially important as we build on new planned functionality, like improved segmentation, A/B testing, and AI-powered updates.

Once we got the green light for Campaigns, I designed & iterated on the flows, while getting continuous feedback from merchants & internal stakeholders.

Here’s a sample of my 90% complete designs:

I’m currently finishing up this project!

Engineers have started backend work, and I’m working to finalize the last 10%! This includes: final copy, error states, annotations to explain how certain interactions work, etc.

To get feedback and conduct usability tests, I’ve been creating clickable prototypes in Figma.