Confirmation emails.
Uh oh…we need confirmation emails…fast!
The team: Product Manager; Chief Content Officer (me)
This example is from my time working at SaaS startup, Hello Coach. Hello Coach is a platform where staff at enterprise-level organisations can find and book qualified personal and professional development coaches.
The challenge
As part of the UX writing for the Hello Coach platform, I worked closely with a Product Manager to create dozens of automated emails that would be triggered by user actions such as signup, password recovery, confirming a booking or cancellation, session reminders and many more.
At a critical stage in the development of a feature where a user could reschedule their coaching session in the calendar, we realised we had no automated confirmation emails written. The devs were waiting, and the demand for these was so urgent, that I wrote the finished copy in 10 minutes, directly into the comments on the JIRA ticket.
The solution
Draft client email
The client email is warm and congratulatory, directly addressing the user and using the word ‘successful’. The information is still clear and concise, but not as concise as the email the coach receives which is different in several ways.
2. Draft coach email
Because coaches manage many bookings each day, and receive many confirmation emails, I wanted to reduce their cognitive load a little, so I:
Shortened the subject line.
Reduced the volume of text, cutting unnecessary words.
Reduced the line spacing to:
Group the critical information (client name and new booking time).
Reduce the need for scanning from client name to times.
Reversed the order of information in the first sentence to lead with the client’s name.
Changed the naming convention from session to ‘booking’ as that is how the coaches commonly refer to sessions.
The result
The Devs got their copy, the PM was happy, production went on, another delay averted.
What did I learn? That in the fast-paced world of startups there sometimes isn’t the luxury of time to spend thinking and outlining, and that it’s possible to turn a task around in a short time when one has complete autonomy and authority and the clock is ticking. Get the MVP version up and working ASAP, then iterate.
The changes to the coach email altered the tone, but our coaches appreciated the clarity and brevity of the text.
These might seem like odd examples to choose, being in a raw, unfinished state and not final-design emails complete with branded headers, etc., but I felt they show as an example of brevity, my thought process, and going a step further in thinking about the needs of the user.
I took a similar approach to the email a coach receives when a client cancels a session:
