Improving the Email Automation configuration experience

[cschalk_ws]

Hi Everyone!

Sending emails is one of the most common automation tasks used in AppSheet today, and we’re looking to improve the experience in configuring these emails – especially with the addition of dynamic email. We’ve received feedback that configuring automated emails, including dynamic or regular, can be confusing or unclear, so we’d love the community’s thoughts on some quick updates that we think will improve usability and clarity.

Proposed Changes

To address reported user confusion, the following functional and usability improvements are proposed.

• Functional improvements

  • Add the ability to quickly “preview email” in a window for both dynamic and regular email types.

• Usability improvements

• Introduce a new “Embedded App View” email type to replace the “Use Dynamic Email” option, as it describes the feature better in that it embeds an app directly into an email.

• Clean up and apply more natural grouping to fields (to, subject, body, etc.) and move the attachment and advanced settings into expandable sections below.

• Remove the “Use default content” toggle and instead populate the subject and body content with default template content to more clearly illustrate how to use email variables and templates along with additional links to reference docs.

Impact on existing email tasks?

• No Impact. All existing email tasks will continue to run properly without errors or changes in the content. Only the configuration UI will change.
• When the subject/body is left blank, the task will continue to send default content.

Automated Email Task Experience Design

Old and new designs in the right settings panel

In this animation the Current Design is first shown in the Settings panel on the right as an automation bot’s task is selected. Note the options: “Use Dynamic Email” and “Use default content?” - which upon toggling displays a long list of complex settings.

The second part displays the Proposed New Design, where the new “Embedded app view” option is shown with its concise and simplified email settings. Also note the “Advanced” settings placed in an expandable area below.

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Old and new designs in the center panel

In this animation, the same two design options are shown in the center panel.

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Looking forward to hearing your feedback on the proposed experience here in our AppSheet Community!

[SkrOYC]

What I don’t get is what you need from us exactly.

You need feedback on what to do or you just want us to say “looks good”, “thanks”?

I mean, clearly you already took a path on what you wanted to do so I don’t get what you need at this point from us.

If you ask me, I would change more things, like that right pannel being changed between the emulator and a “bot settings”. There should be an option for us to opt if we want that small and not-so-useful “bot settings” or the full view by default.
It doesn’t make too much sense for me and I always go manually to the corresponding Events, Processes and Tasks tabs.

Another thing that may help is if you add links to articles of the documentation that explain the kind of templates that we can make/use and also the output of those templates. A lot of people is really confused about them.

Preview the email seems like a good addition, I like that. But will it support any type of template (GDocs/MSWord/HTML)? Also, what’s going to be the output of our expressions inside those templates? <<[Like this]>> or the actual data? Finally, what about the email clients support. Are you going to just concentrate on how good an email body will look on Gmail online client and forget about everyone else?

[Koichi_Tsuji]

We yet see the new UX on our editor, so the feedback is limited though, I wish to point out folllowings.

1. “Embeded App View” - button name will cause the confusions to the average users. Better to be consistant with “Dynamic Email” as you call this function

2. Buttons location - The most of the use cases for email task is to set up custom email rather than dynamic email for the majority of the users. Taking into account this, the custom template button should locate on the left instead of right. Furthermore, the custom template should be selected by default as well, to make our life little easier.

3. We wish to see “preview email” new fetures, as it was not mentioned in your GIF for review.

thank you.

@takuya_miyai

[Koichi_Tsuji]

This is a question. How this new UX is going to be rolling out? From Free account? When the paid users will see this on their editor?

@takuya_miyai

[Koichi_Tsuji]

I checked today, but no change we are seeing.

Wondering when this change will be delivered to the users after the official announcement was made days ago…

[Steve]

Escalated.

[Ryan_Wagner]

“Looking forward to hearing your feedback on the proposed experience.”

My assumption is that they want to know what users think before they finalize and roll-out changes.

[cschalk_ws]

Hey Folks!

Thanks so much for the additional questions and feedback.
Here’s a run through of the questions posted so far.. with some quick answers. Feel free to request further clarification though.

Questions from the community so far (aggregated/paraphrased):

1. How is this new UX going to be rolling out? From a Free account? When will the paid users see this in their editor?

We’re planning on rolling this feature out like most other features, first to free users and then later to paid users. We’re early in the design/development so far, and wanted to get feedback from the community before moving forward.

1. The “Embedded App View” button name will cause the confusion to the average users. Better to be consistent with “Dynamic Email” as you call this function.

Thanks for your feedback. That’s interesting – we actually encountered a lot of confusion with “dynamic email” when interviewing a number of average users in our UX studies (not power users) – many thought it referred to the ability to use template variables instead. We’ll note this feedback and we’re interested in whether other folks from the community think the same.

1. Buttons location - The most of the use cases for email task is to set up custom email rather than dynamic email for the majority of the users. Taking into account this, the custom template button should locate on the left instead of right. Furthermore, the custom template should be selected by default as well, to make our life little easier.

Thank you for your feedback. Switching the order of the buttons and selecting ‘Custom template’ seems reasonable. We’ll discuss and report back.

1. We wish to see “preview email” new features, as it was not mentioned in your GIF for review.

The ‘Preview email’ for ‘Custom templates’ simply renders the Email Body in a separate window.

Example:

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Note: The content at the top of the preview, ‘Update to application…’, is simply a preheader section and is not rendering a preview of the Subject.
We’ll be looking into possibly rendering other fields in the preview like ‘Subject’, ‘CC’ and so on.

1. Another thing that may help is if you add links to articles of the documentation that explain the kind of templates that we can make/use and also the output of those templates.

Depending what you mean by “template”, we are actually adding links to documentation on how to use HTML and template variables, right next to the fields where you can use them. Perhaps we’re misunderstanding your meaning?

1. Will the Preview Email support any type of template (GDocs/MSWord/HTML)?

The Preview Email supports any template, including Google Docs, MS Word, HTML etc.

1. What’s going to be the output of expressions inside templates? <<[Like this]>> or the actual data?

Expressions in the preview are rendered with actual data.

1. What about other email clients support, in addition to Gmail?

The current support relies upon AMP for Gmail, and for this reason, we are unlikely to support other clients in the near future.

[Ryan_Mortimer]

While we are at it, and this may be a little off-topic, can we please finally do something about the “Powered by AppSheet” at the bottom of emails?

Some of us (and our customers) pay significant licence fees (in some cases, multiple lots of significant licence fees) and it makes us hard to sell on AppSheet products.

I had to automate one of my customers emails through SendGrid to avoid this annoying little message.

[takuya_miyai]

Hi @cschalk_ws

we actually encountered a lot of confusion with “dynamic email” when interviewing a number of average users in our UX studies (not power users)

I am wondering what will be the native language of the subjects of this UX survey.
If the survey is only for English speakers, I feel that it is necessary to survey users whose native language is not English.
If there are no plans to translate the AppSheet into other languages at this time, I would like to see consideration given to users whose native language is not English.

I believe that “Embedded App View” is a rather difficult word to grasp the meaning for the average Japanese citizen developer.

[cschalk_ws]

Thanks so much for the additional feedback on the term ‘Dynamic Email’. We had a good discussion within the product team about the ‘Dynamic Email’ term changing to 'Embedded App View", and in the end decided to stick with the new term, at least for now.
As a result of our internal discussion, we will definitely prioritize our efforts to provide helpful documentation and hover cards/tooltips to further clarify the new term, especially for non English speakers.
Bringing technical concepts and terminology into increasingly less technical audiences, especially when English is not their native language, is a non trivial challenge - but your feedback is well appreciated and reminds us to strive for optimal understanding of all of our terminology to a global audience.

[takuya_miyai]

@cschalk_ws

Thank you for considering this based on community feedback.

I know that taking into account users from all over the world is a difficult task for English speakers.
I appreciate your consideration of our many users.

[JoeBirk]

@Ryan_Mortimer It took me a while to find this but there is an option to switch on the “White Label this app” that will remove the Appsheet branding on the email automations however there are some plan requirement that apply.

[JoeBirk]

What I like most about this is announcement is,

But where I would really like to see is it is a new “View” type that displays a preview of the entire template (filled, not tags) that is visible inside the App.

[EliK]

Hi @cschalk_ws

I noticed that although there is a “Preview Email” button for the email body, there isn’t one for an email attachment generated from a template.

Is there a plan to add that soon?