Overview

CVS was managing 130+ separate types of emails, just for what they deemed, “order status communications” (prescription orders, confirmations etc. across multiple lines of business). Communications had grown out of control, requiring most of the key business units’ involvement in order to discover, define and document what was essential, before any real work was to be done to clean up and consolidate.

I worked with a team of designers, programmers content strategists, product partners, managers and directors.

Defining business units and bounded contexts, we began to uncover the types of interaction which were necessary to the business and customers. From the discovery and definition sessions held, we consolidated over 130 discovered email/ communication types into 6 design templates for 6 lines of business (24 emails total) which could be placed into a newly minted CMS.

This case study is focused on the process employed as a pilot with order status emails. Other notifications which followed, thanks to this framework of partnering, discovery and definition led to later efforts including the rebuilding of reminder emails, cancellation emails, and SMS, native app live activities, etc.

Owners and communication channels being defined as bounded contexts

Skills

Design Team Management, Systems Thinking, Product Strategy, Negotiation Skills, Visual Design, User Experience Design, User Research, Usability Testing & Analysis

Time Frame

January-June

Role

Senior User Experience Design Manager

I collaborated with our Product Director and our Senior Design Lead to strategize how to consolidate these communications.

I reviewed and gave feedback on all designs and content along the way, as well as helping gain business approvals.

I gave other designers and directors guidance or provided alternative design takes and competitive analysis examples when they were stuck or needed direction on next steps in our weekly 1:1s and collaboration meetings.

I analyzed usability testing results which validated our designs and content and helped create the user testing plan with our research partners.

Outcome

We set up a strategy for consolidating the emails by identifying common sections, writing new content, and creating components to build the emails:

Consolidated 130+ email designs into 6 reusable templates in Figma and for use in the newly minted CMS built on SalesForce.

Created a new consistent messaging experience for customers in terms of branding, voice, and design (regardless of service or business area).

Decreased average time to create design/content adjustments down to to minutes rather than days for designers, content strategists, and engineers by contributing these design patterns back into the Figma design library which was being built. For context, only atomic components were becoming available in the design library, and this effort was contributing whole patterns as well as creating some of the truly first responsive email designs available to CVS, Caremark, Aetna, thanks to coding and testing using Litmus.

Strategy

How to consolidate disparate communications

I worked closely with our senior designer to break down the steps of how we could work towards consolidating the design and content of the emails, then delegating it out to our team as tasks and deliverables.

We understood that in order to get to our goal, we needed to first gather all existing confirmation emails, identify common sections, create a new template structure, and then design new emails based on that template. The process looked something like this:

1. Identify and create common email sections
   • Each product partner gathers emails for all services​​
   • Chi and myself and Director review existing production emails to identify common email sections (reviewed by myself and Chi)​​​
2. Create email template​ structure
   • Visual Design Lead creates common email sections as individual and reusable ‘components’ with variants in Figma (I was reviewer, along with another Sr Design Manager, content partners and our Director)​​
3. Unify content for all emails based on the template and get approval​
   • Each product owner in a business unit along with programmers gather current state dynamic content across each email section, and content partners suggest unified content, and content authors would inventory everything in Airtable to check for consistency
   • Content Strategist reviews and edits product partner suggestions of unified content (reviewed by myself, senior manager, and Content Manager)
   • New consolidated emails were created using Figma components and the updated unified content
   • My Director and I facilitated stakeholder reviews of the new emails
   • Content Strategist makes updates based on stakeholder reviews of the emails
   • UXR and I conducted usability testing for the emails to verify the designs and content function as designed

​

We reviewed the plan with our Product and Engineering leadership to make sure it would fit with their timeline and we weren’t missing anything.

I planned out the tasks needing to be done for our 2-week Agile sprints by working with product, management and the business to write stories, estimate the work, and schedule deliverables so the work could be completed in 5 sprints or less.

This took an entire quarter to execute with some delays resulting from so many disparate group approvers, but our initial plan worked, as everyone had a defined role and series of tasks that worked towards accomplishing that goal successfully.

* Some imagery has been masked where it would compromise key elements of a business or reveal trade secrets. Other imagery is from production.