Product design | Research | Development
In December 2023, Iterable hosted a Hack Week to create new features geared towards reducing complexity and making the user experience better. With the help of another designer, Dylan Mahler, we got a small team together to create a new global menu that we dubbed the "quick actions" menu.
The idea was to fill a couple of gaps we had noticed with the platform such as, the absence of a global search, needing to load large index pages to create new items (campaigns, templates, journeys, etc.), and the lack of keyboard shortcuts for our advanced users.
Over the week, we researched, designed, and developed the menu and ended up winning the People's Choice Award at the end of Hack Week!
Creating a new campaign without ever having to open the Campaigns page.
After walking away with a win, we continued to refine the product and continued doing both internal and external customer research while we tinkered with the code to get it just right.
Fast forward and there's now a dedicated team working on the menu to continue improving its features and building new features for it that we hope to launch to all of our customers soon.
Here's a list of features the menu added that were completely new to Iterable:
A global search that searches all users and resources within a project
The ability to open any user profile or resource no matter where you are in the platform
The ability to quickly navigate between pages
The ability to create any resource without having to load a content heavy index page
Keyboard shortcuts
/ opens the menu
Shift + U opens the user search
Shift + C opens the campaign search
Shift + T opens the template search
Shift + J opens the journey search
Demonstration of the quick actions menu.
Outcome
The design team was able to sneak the feature into the Product Showcase during Activate 2024 in San Jose and it was met with instant praise. I had the pleasure of getting to walk people through the feature on the show floor and even had a few people tell me it was their most anticipated feature after the showcase! Not bad for a hack week project, eh?
Currently the Quick Actions menu is only available for internal use, but the public beta is slated to kick off in September 2024. But for those who have had the opportunity to use it, they say it's hard to go back.
I'm excited to finally get the feature into the hands of our customers so the team can start receiving more user feedback to make the feature a staple of the Iterable experience.