Faster onboarding for Flexmail
At Smooth Sailing I worked with Flexmail, a Belgian email-marketing platform, to make a mature, engineering-led product easier for new users to get started with, without breaking the workflows of the customers who had relied on it for years.
The context
After twelve years of engineering-led development, Flexmail had grown powerful but dense. Layers of configuration had accumulated, and getting a new user productive took a long time, with the sales team spending much of its energy simply explaining how the product worked. That slowed time-to-value and pulled sales away from what they should have been doing: closing deals.
Starting where the friction was: contacts
The heaviest friction sat in contact management, so that is where we started. We redesigned it into a single, central place to upload, browse, edit, and segment contacts, instead of data scattered across the product. Consolidating it made the data clearer and made segmentation something people could actually use.
Testing with real customers
We user-tested with five potential and existing customers to find the recurring friction points, then designed against those rather than against our assumptions. Seeing where real people hesitated told us which parts of the flow were doing the damage.
A careful rollout
A mature product comes with long-time customers who have built habits around it. We managed the rollout so the simpler experience worked for new users without disrupting the people who had used Flexmail for years, changing the on-ramp without pulling the rug out from under anyone.
Weeks → days
Onboarding dropped from weeks to days, and demos were no longer needed just to get someone started. The sales team could go back to selling, and Flexmail invested further in product, hiring a junior product manager and training internal designers to keep evolving it.
"Smooth Sailing rocks at challenging existing concepts, but they are conscious enough to stay true to the nature of your product."
Michelle Dassen, Business & Product Lead, Flexmail
My role
This was UX design and research work at Smooth Sailing: digging into where new users got stuck, redesigning contact management as the core of a simpler onboarding, testing it with real customers, and helping shepherd the change out to an established user base.