Postscript Popup Scheduling
Objective
During user research interview sessions, we found that customers were staying up until midnight to swith over popups to time-specific marketing / offers (think holiday deals that expire after 24 hours). That is not an ideal workflow, so we wanted to give them a solution to schedule popups to turn on / off ahead of time.
Role
I was the sole designer for the discovery and design phase of this project, working with a product manager and engineering team.
Initially, my idea was to have a separate Schedule tab, with a time-ordered list of scheduled events that would occur. This came as we were trying to figure out how to split our navigation around Popups, so splitting into three tabs here made sense.
However, as I shared progress on this direction with the team, it became clear that this would not be in scope, so I had to pull back on this idea and see what I could accomplish without adding navigation elements.
Another exploration I did featured a list of scheduled popup events on the same page as the popups list, but it wasn’t what we were looking for. It wasn’t very scalable, wasn’t easy to link back to the popups involved, so I moved on.
Final design
The finished design incorporated a modal to set up a schedule for a popup. Popups that had scheduled events would display an icon next to their title, with a tooltip displaying more information. Schedules can be edited in the Actions dropdown for a particular popup. The engineers on my team were able to implement this solution more quickly, getting this into customers’ hands sooner than if we had proceeded with the other solutions I proposed.
Final Thoughts
Initial usage for the scheduler has been low, however, this feature was intended to make Postscript’s popups more usable for customers, and more competitive against the feature set of other products in the same space. It is an extension of our popups and a “quality of life” booster, rather than a feature meant to push business metrics. Through analytics tracking I have seen that popup scheduling usage goes up around holidays (eg: Labor Day, Halloween), which was its original purpose.