ActiveCampaign App Experience
Providing the tools marketers need to do business their way.
The Setup
About ActiveCampaign: ActiveCampaign is an industry leader in customer experience automation (CXA) with a particular focus on small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). ActiveCampaign empowers its users to do more with their marketing by automating crucial but repetitive tasks, freeing marketers to focus on utilizing their creativity and ambition in their marketing efforts.
The Setting: The average marketer uses 12+ apps to conduct their daily business. ActiveCampaign wants to integrate those apps into AC to provide a seamless way for marketers to conduct their business the way that works best for them.
Problem Space: ActiveCampaign has provided connections to various third-parties for years, but these apps have always utilized an intermediary (such as Zapier or Piesync) which led to additional costs and a subpar user experience for marketers.
Personas: Marketers
Project Duration: Ongoing
Defining the Problem
With the release of App Studio, we needed to provide a world class marketplace to showcase the powerful new native apps being built. Historically, apps have been a bit of an afterthought at ActiveCampaign, but we are working to make them a first-class citizen in the AC ecosystem.
By providing our marketers with a great app experience, we can drive even more app connections and provide an enhanced AC experience that brings all the tools our marketers use into their main marketing tool.
“The average marketer uses at least 12 apps, how can we integrate all those apps seamlessly into ActiveCampaign?”
Research and Ideation
ActiveCampaign has a long history of interconnectivity with other third-parties. However, this experience has several major shortcomings. The experience is currently driven by intermediaries like Piesync and Zapier. This means our marketers can’t act as effectively on the data they’re sending between platforms, and can even lead to increased costs.
We began by sending a short survey to all of our active app users. This survey gave great insight into the primary pain points with the current state of our app ecosystem. It also provided a list of the most engaged app users. We followed up with these users and scheduled qualitative interviews to dig deeper into the pain points highlighted by the survey.
After finishing the interviews, we laid out an end-to-end user journey and highlighted the areas in the journey causing the most pain to our users. We developed a hypothesis for alleviating these pain points and sketched possible solutions.
I broke down each pain point by its place in the user journey and designed and prototyped our sketches in Figma. We conducted usability tests and followup interviews utilizing these prototypes and iterated based on feedback.
After testing and iteration, we laid out the product roadmap for the marketer app experience. We have been building, releasing, and iterating based on this roadmap for almost two years.
Ongoing Research
At ActiveCampaign, we work hard to talk to at least two users every week so that we receive a constant stream of feedback on our changes, and can have an informed approach to planning our roadmap. These interviews normally involve a designer (me) and the relevant product manager. We also utilize Pendo to track and analyze user behavior in order to identify and resolve UX issues and pain points as quickly as possible.
The Design
The AC App Experience has several major parts: the App Marketplace, apps in Automations, and the connect and configure flow for setting up and managing apps.
The App Marketplace
Finding and installing apps within ActiveCampaign had long been a difficult change. It often involved having to create third-party accounts, and frequently led to increased costs for our users. With the enhanced power of the Layer and App Studio providing powerful new native apps, we wanted to design a beautiful and functional native way to find and connect apps.
Below you can see the old and new versions of the App Marketplace side-by-side.
The old ‘All Apps’ page
The updated App Marketplace design
The updated version adds additional user onboarding, enhanced search, upgraded browse-ability by including app categories, and an updated UI for app listings. The updated version also brings apps in the platform in-line with their depictions on the AC marketing site, providing a more unified visual language for the app ecosystem as a whole.
Apps in Automations
App based triggers in the AC Automations platform.
Automations are the heart and soul of ActiveCampaign. As a customer experience automation (CXA) company, automations provide the backbone of our user experience. Seamlessly integrating the enhanced functionality of apps into the automations experience was crucial to the success of the app ecosystem as a whole.
Here you can see an example of some recently added app-based triggers. These trigger automations based on activity in third-party apps. Also included in automations are app-based actions, which will perform certain actions - by updating inbound, outbound, and internal data - when proper conditions are met.
Connect and Configure Apps
A mockup showing the authentication and data mapping steps of setting up an app.
One of the most important pieces of the app ecosystem is the connect-setup-map flow for connecting and configuring new apps. We built a framework for connecting and managing all apps within AC that provides our third-party developers the flexibility they need, while remaining familiar to our users. The goal of this process is to provide a seamless way to authenticate an app connection and configure data translation into or out of ActiveCampaign.
We support several kinds of authentication - including ‘standard’ username/pass, oAuth, and API keys. Selecting resources for workflows is tailored to specific apps. Data mapping follows an “everything you need, nothing you don’t” approach, and relies on the power of the Layer to properly translate incoming and outgoing data.
Recently, we added the power of custom objects to the app ecosystem. This allows apps to build custom data structures within ActiveCampaign and greatly enhances the power and flexibility of apps.
User Feedback
“Apps let me use the tools I like in the way that’s most comfortable for me. It’s made ActiveCampaign so much more powerful.”
“Being able to use the data I have outside of ActiveCampaign in automations has been such a game changer.”