Smart Send
The Superhuman for Sales team was tasked with finding opportunities to make our product more valuable to salespeople, specifically Account Executives and Sales Leaders.
Sending email is an incredibly important piece of sales outreach, building customer relationships, and closing deals. Smart Send was our way of ensuring our users never had to worry about when to send the email.
The Problem
Account executives are sending a heavy volume of email at all times during the day, to customers all over the world. When a customer receives an email could be the difference between a quick response or it getting buried in their inbox.
With traditional email scheduling, account executives have to remember and think about what time zone their potential customers may be in, and schedule the email for when they think would be the best time to send it. We aimed to solve this problem.
Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis was our first step in our design strategy. Given that we were a bit late to the sales email game, it was important for us to fully understand how we compared in the market and to look for opportunities to differentiate ourselves.
After a thorough analysis we felt we could differentiate ourselves through opinionated, minimal, yet highly discoverable UX.
Outside Business Hours
Originally we felt we could make the biggest impact in the quickest amount of time by just ensuring that an email was being sent during the recipient's business hours. Early explorations were made sure to stay consistent with other ongoing design projects that had a similar use case of "hey you might want to know this about your email recipients".
%20copy.png)
Change in Scope
The project scope changed however after a couple of design reviews, where our CEO over time became convinced that we should tackle a larger piece of the "scheduling email" problem and invest more into delivering something more personalized and valuable.
The increase in scope greatly increased the amount of user scenarios and edge cases to think through. Together with my PM we sought to have an opinion on how and what we should show the user depending on what type of data we had available, whether the recipient's current time was inside or outside of business hours, whether the user's current time was close to our recommended time, etc.
Button Explorations
It was only after we had a strong opinion on every possible user scenario, that I began exploring all the different ways we could surface this feature to users. Some of the challenges here were how limited the screen real estate was (where all of the email send actions were). This challenge was compounded further by Superhuman's value on design minimalism.
FINAL DESIGN
Appears Like Magic
When a recipient is selected, the "Send later" button flourishes into a "Smart Send" to discreetly signal that a new send option has become available without being distracting.
Hover State
On hover, users immediately get a sense of the value of the feature, with tightly written product copy.
CMD K Menu
On click or press, users are taken to our CMD K menu where Smart Send is the first option. Users can schedule the perfect time to send an email with just one button press.
Multiple Recipients
If the user is sending an email to multiple recipients with Smart Send data, they can easily use the keyboard to navigate who they want to optimize the scheduling for.
Metrics and Success
After launching the feature, a spike of 2,532 users opted into our sales feature suite (a 300% increase over our usual growth rate) , indicating that that this was a feature that solved a core user pain point.
Among users who regularly scheduled emails to be sent later, we saw a sustained 26% of them use Smart Send on a weekly basis, a number we expect to continue to grow as the algorithm improves and users start to build trust with the future.