E-mail Smart Alerts
crimson hexagon
Smart Alerts was conceived out of the desire to track what's happening on social media in real time. Before Smart Alerts, you had to set up a keyword search, and a very specific element or hashtag you were watching for, and we would send you a text email alert when that thing happened, if it ever did. If you really wanted to track how your brand was doing, not to mention your competitors, you had to set up dozens or even hundreds of alerts. Even then, it was impossible to track new hashtags, because how can you set up an alert for something that doesn't exist?
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Smart Alerts monitored the entire social media landscape, looking for changes in what was normal. When it found something, it alerted you with not only what was abnormal, how far out of normal it was, and some example posts of what may be causing it.
Process
This was one of those features that started as just a vision. The goal of the project was just to make our existing alerting system a little better. But then we asked ourselves "What if we could monitor social media in real time and alert you to things that you don't even know to be looking for?"
We started with the feedback that our existing alerts were very difficult to set up and use, without actually being very helpful. Not a good place to start. We went to a couple of huge companies I'm not allowed to name, (one served a billion hamburgers, the other is a huge mobile phone maker not named after a fruit), and we listened to what they thought a social media alerting platform should do. We set up monthly check-ins with them, and some smaller companies without dedicated social media teams, so they could see and use features as we were building them, to make sure it met their all their needs.
This project, more than most I've worked on, was driven by what was technically possible. We were really pushing the limits of technology, creating something no one else had done. The UX had to stay in lockstep with the tech, and let our data-scientists lead the way. My challenge was incorporating what they invented on a daily basis into a design to pass on to developers in real time. I focused on scalability and modular design, carving out areas that could be re-worked if necessary without compromising the overall experience.
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There were two separate elements to the design of this feature: Setting up an alert, and the email alert itself.
Setup
One of the challenges with social media alerts is how volatile they can be. Some alerts need to be built for finding a single new post, and some need to be tailored to analyzing subtle changes across a million posts. Measuring changes in hashtags sponsored by Nike is fundamentally different than measuring hashtags started by Nana's Bakery. Users also needed to be able to turn them on and off as marketing campaigns changed, and we built the system with some amount of customization, giving the users a way to choose how far out of normal the conversation could get before the alert was sent.
One of the most contentious issues in the design of this feature was how much to explain how it worked. We were normalizing the data based on volatility and using standard deviations away from a mean to generate the alerts. For "normal users", their eyes glaze over at the mere mention of something like "standard deviations", but our users were mostly power users and data analysts, with backgrounds in statistics. We decided to include a description of how the alerts worked, while keeping the language in the actual control mostly generic.
You can see our modular design principle at work here, where each section could be re-worked if needed, without affecting how the user interacted with the feature as a whole. As we built individual features, like the ability to optionally choose a filter, or to subscribe additional recipients, they easily slotted in and we were able to demo and release to users what we had completed, getting feedback along the way.
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The ability to subscribe other users to your alert was a highly requested feature, and one that we didn't anticipate at the outset of the project. We listened to users tell us about times where alerts they had set up were triggered, but they were on vacation, and we realized that getting alerts to the right user at the right time required more than just relying on email forwarding. We added in a feature to allow users to subscribe others to the email alerts, giving users the ability to put their phone down without feeling like they're going to miss a part of their responsibility.
Designing visualizations is always challenging. Conveying in a glance exactly why you're receiving an email you didn't necessarily ask for was difficult. After a few iterations I designed a stylized radial graph to show what was driving the change we were detecting, and how much that particular section was responsible for the change. It's designed to be able to be read on a phone as easily as a desktop, and the reaction from clients was great. It resonated really well as something they could glance at, and immediately know whether it was important.
It also helped sell the entire project to stakeholders and executives. Getting executives behind a project that may or may not even be possible is always difficult. We needed to be able to sell the vision, and then execute something really close to what we were showing. A flashy and functional visualization leading off a well-designed email gave us enough buy-in from stakeholders to let us continue, and as that email came together with the functionality, we knew we had something to be proud of.
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Continuing the theme of the email, which is to give you enough information to make a decision to log in, we thought it was really important to show additional information on each of the sections. In this case, we have increasing volume. But knowing that alone isn't enough. How much it is increasing? Is it gradual, as you would expect when rolling out the soft-launch of a market campaign, or is it spiking, which is usually when something bad is happening to your brand.
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We also thought is was crucial to include examples of the posts driving the alerts, with the ability to click through to the actual post on whatever social media platform it came from. In social media situations, which are often PR crises, response speed is essential, for better or worse, and getting to the post directly from the email was a huge hit from the companies we demoed this too.
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We had a different design for each of the sections, but only implemented Volume and New Hashtags before the company was acquired.
