I began my discovery by auditing existing emails and introducing quick optimisations. Low effort, and high impact.

These included;

• Optimising for accessibility

• Removing text from images

• Focussing on functionality before delight

• Presenting content in a scannable and digestible way

• Introducing a mobile first philosophy (as >60% of our cross channel traffic was from mobile users)

• Ensuring information hierarchy reflected the objective

• Streamlining CTAs and removing cognitive load by reducing action points

To get an idea of how other companies make their emails work. What are other business doing well? What works? What doesn’t? How could these experience be improved? What are we going to introduce to our own designs?

We took inspiration from Brad Frost’s ‘Atomic design’ for the build approach for this system.

”Atomic design is methodology for creating design systems.” Essentially it means building from the ground up.

The foundations are the visual and structural principles of our design system. We can consider them to be the rules that are at the very centre of our designs.

The primary foundations of this system included;

• Colours

• Typography

• Spacing rules

• Layouts

Atoms are the smallest building blocks of a design system. Although not particularly useful on their own, they inform the way we build molecules, and in turn components. Their inclusion allows us to understand the fundamental parts that we are working with.

In our case the library of atoms is small when compared to more complex design systems, and indicator of a sturdy and modular library of assets.

When atoms are combined to create more intuitive elements, the result is called a molecule.

We create content blocks through combining molecules.

Content blocks are created by combining molecules. We introduced three block styles;

• Global

• Transactional

• Marketing

‘Transactional’ and ‘marketing’ content blocks were in line with our two high level journey types. ‘Global’ blocks we built for to suit both. We decided as a team that we wanted to create a clear visual differentiation between transactional and marketing emails, we therefore designed each style against a set of specific principles.

Principles for transactional emails;

• Informative. Give the customer access to all the information they need in a digestible format

• Reliable. Build trust between Cazoo and users

• Task driven. The purpose of these emails is to ensure that our customers have access to everything they need

• Intuitive. Give the customer the freedom to create their own journey that suits their needs. / help the customer to personalise their own journey

Primciples for marketing

• Authentic. Genuine, thoughtful communication of our props and value

• Focussed. Communicating the right things to the right customers at the right time

• Confident and customer led. Not desperate, we believe in what we offer. We help the customer find the right car for them. For example, instead of “please buy our cars” we opt for “let us help find the right car for you”

• Trustworthy - speaks for itself

For this project, was worked on alongside the design process.

I collaborated with content design and developers to create detailed documentation, complete with usage guidelines and design recommendations for this asset library

Feedback
Throughout the process, there were regular check-ins with the teams. I’d contribute at design critiques, stakeholder updates and a number of other ceremonies.

Workshops
With regards to workshops, I’d conduct these on a regular basis. Ensuring that the team were happy was a number one priority, as they were to be the ones working with the designs. For the design system to be a success it truly had to be a collaborative effort - nothing was completed behind closed doors.

It was important to hold onto the mindset that we had two users; customers would be interacting with the designs. But the team, both strategic and technical would be bringing them to life.

Testing
Stress testing the designs was straightforward. However technical testing was a challenge.

For a long time we had to work a way around a lack of technical resource in the team. This meant that to keep moving forward I had to make assumption based decisions, before getting the opportunity to pair with any devs.

I knew that HTML coding had it’s limitations, not to mention the email clients themselves - it was a tricky.

Eventually, developers were drafted in and the designs were finally put to the test - fortunately we weren’t set back too much and there weren’t any major changes that needed to be made. Just a few tweaks.