About Social Nature

At Social Nature, we're dedicated to helping people make greener choices. As a member of our Social Nature community, users get to try greener choices like organic deodorants, vegan mascara, healthy snacks, and eco-friendly cleaners for free. In return, we ask them to share their opinion with our community, and if they liked the product, invite their friends, fans, and followers to try it as well!

Project Overview

In 2021, one of our company objectives was to Scale Through Technology. As Social Nature grows and more campaigns need to be created and managed by the Customer Success team, a need for automation and optimization of current processes became evident so that we wouldn't have to double our team to handle the increasing demand.

My Role

• UX Review (Current User Flows)

• User Interviews

• New User Flow/UX Design

• UI Design & Prototyping

• User Testing

• Email Template Design (Mailchimp)

The Problem

One of the most important steps in making sure users get their free samples is shipment management. Previously, this process happened in three different places; an internal dashboard, Google Sheets and Google Drive.

In addition to the decentralized system, the Customer Success team was tracking campaign fulfilment, shipping progress, and communicating with warehouses, all through a very complex, repetitive and manual process. Even though the team learned how to work with that system throughout the years, with the increasing number of campaigns happening at the same time, they were having to spend countless hours managing them.

The Process

The first exercise I did was to have our Community Operations Specialist show me, step by step, what went into managing campaigns and shipping. He showed me how the internal dashboard was used, how their sheet was structured and updated, and how they communicated with the warehouses.

By doing that exercise, I was able to identify the main pain points and biggest opportunities for automation, and as a team, we then decided on the business requirements for a new internal dashboard that would be built from scratch and used to reduce the amount of time and steps needed to manage all of those campaigns.

The Solution

The new dashboard was designed to centralize all shipping management in one place, while making it intuitive enough that any team member can use it. With the new system, internal users can easily create shipping batches and track which ones have been sent to the warehouse or been shipped. The new dashboard also allows warehouses to get automatically notified through a dynamic email that contains all documents and files needed, which are programatically formatted and renamed so that no manual work is needed.

For this project, I was in charge of creating all user flows and the interface of the dashboard. I was also responsible for coming up with naming conventions for files that were automatically generated, as well as creating the structure of the email templates that were used to communicate with the warehouses. There was also a lot of work involved in communicating with the the Engineering team to understand how certain automations would happen, so that I could craft the best experience for our internal users.

The Impact

• Time spent managing shipments decreased from 30 mins to 5 mins per campaign (600% improvement).

• All manual work became automated.