Projects
Smart email schedule
User Research
UX
UI
Created at KOMI
KOMI is an all-in-one platform designed to help creators, such as influencers, musicians, and podcasters, grow their income and engagement. It offers tools like a mini-site builder, monetization hub, and email/SMS marketing features. KOMI enables creators to centralize their offerings, connect with fans, secure brand partnerships, and sell digital products. Trusted by prominent names like Jessica Alba and Usher, it supports a global community of creators, helping them maximize their commercial potential and manage fan relationships effectively.
Project background
After the launch of our CRM product with an email builder tool, changes in email regulations by Google and Yahoo introduced significant challenges for email deliverability. These regulations mandated a gradual build-up of sender reputation, severely impacting non-frequent senders and limiting their ability to send large campaigns. The operational fallout was substantial, draining sales, product, and engineering resources and making our platform unsustainable in its existing self-serve model.
I was the lead & sole designer for the CRM product and this project and was responsible for collaborating with product and engineering on defining the requirements as well as executing on user research, UX and UI.
While we had to prioritize speed over user experience, this allowed us to be the first in the market to respond to these regulatory changes, delivering critical functionality ahead of competitors and laying the groundwork for future iterations.
The problem
The regulatory changes introduced several issues we needed to address:
Restrictions on non-frequent senders: Large campaigns sent without an established sender reputation faced high rejection rates or ended up in spam.
Operational bottlenecks: Account managers had to manually segment lists, increasing operational overhead.
User frustration: Customers could no longer rely on the platform for self-serve email marketing.
Through user interviews and data analysis, we identified a key contradiction: while customers wanted to send large drops to maximize campaign impact, this approach directly risked damaging their sender and domain reputations. Most users were also completely unaware of the new restrictions, which caused even more frustration when they weren't able to send their campaigns. This led to poor campaign outcomes.
Project objectives
Once we've spoken to our users and the ops team, it became clear that goal was threefold:
Educate users about new email sending practices and the importance of sender reputation.
Enable staggered sending for large campaigns without adding complexity for users.
Align the platform experience with regulatory requirements while improving deliverability and maintaining ROI for users.
Additionally, it became clear that we needed to add more communication channels to our platform, such as SMS. The email restrictions made it impossible to satisfy the needs of the users when it came to sending a large number of messages at once without a warm domain. We tackled that as a separate project.
Constraints
Working in a startup oftentimes means working at a faster pace with limited resources. That significantly affected what we could do as the business required a quick turnaround on the project.
First and foremost, the feature needed to allow users to self-serve and remove the operational burden, even if that meant certain things like entering segment size couldn't be automated. It was definitely an interesting problem for me to solve: ensure the flow was easy to understand and use while continuously getting feedback from engineering and working together on simplifying the functionalities, to meet the deadline.
Designing the MVP
From the very beginning, it was clear to us that the whole scheduling functionality needed to change from being just a time and date selector. That became the main focus of the project.
We needed the user to give us a couple of pieces of information: the desired date and time and the number of users they were sending to. Based on those, a sending schedule would be calculated, with the sending capacity gradually ramping up each day. If they wanted to send to a number that was higher than 1,000, a warning would be displayed, linking out to a detailed support page for more information. In the future, we were going to improve the flow by determining the segment size and current capacity automatically, and only warning the user when applicable.
The initial designs separated the scheduling experience onto two steps, so that the user could still see the preview of their campaign. The user would first have to select the desired send date & time and enter a number of fans they'd be sending to. However, having to go over two steps to schedule proved to be confusing to users, especially when it came to having a clear correlation between the available settings and how they affected the send schedule.
To solve the issue, I used the preview window as a space to preview the schedule instead of displaying the actual email, because it was no longer relevant to the user at the point of scheduling. That iteration performed much better, since users were able to adjust their settings and review the result right away, on the same screen. The MVP was launched in May 2024.
Key outcomes
We were the first in our competitive landscape to release a compliance-oriented feature set for email deliverability, which showcased our ability to innovate and establish a reputation as a proactive partner capable of adapting quickly to market needs, which also increased customer trust.
While we lacked the time to perfect the user experience, the speed of our response reassured customers and prevented churn during a critical period. At the same time, the MVP provided a launchpad for more sophisticated iterations, including a deeper focus on user experience as well as SMS functionality.
Customers also reported 1.5-4x higher ROI when sending their campaigns using KOMI, compared to our main competitors. This was based on a number of factors, including the higher deliverability rate they experienced.