ActiveCampaign App Studio
A comprehensive toolkit for third-party app developers.
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: ActiveCampaign is building out a new and advanced App Ecosystem and wants to provide marketers and third-party developers with the tools they need to build apps within ActiveCampaign, both for private use and public consumption.
Problem Space: ActiveCampaign can never singlehandedly build every app our users need, so we need to provide a toolkit for third-party developers to build, test, and publish apps with minimal assistance from AC. Allowing third-party developers to easily build apps will grow the AC App Ecosystem in an exponential way, providing huge value for our marketers.
Personas: Third-party developers and marketers
Project Duration: 2 months to initial release, ongoing
Defining the Problem
ActiveCampaign wants to provide a huge lineup of apps so that marketers can find and use whatever tools they need within ActiveCampaign. However, AC has finite resources and limited time - there’s simply no way AC can build every app in-house.
By providing developers with the tools necessary to quickly and easily build, test, and release apps on the AC platform, we can extend our app capabilities far beyond what we would be able to build ourselves.
“Developers want to build apps for ActiveCampaign. What tools do they need to accomplish that goal?”
Research and Ideation
We began by conducting qualitative interviews with some of our most engaged marketers and developers. These users had expressed prior interest in building apps for ActiveCampaign. This group included a wide range of technical expertise, and gave us great insight into the tools and skills necessary to build an effective AC app.
After finishing the interviews, we laid out an end-to-end user journey and drafted a list of all the requisite tools to complete the task of building, testing, and releasing an app.
I designed and prototyped a lightweight user-experience which we tested with our developers in a qualitative way in order to get feedback on the user experience, and to ensure we were providing all of the necessary tools for developers.
After testing and iteration, we built and released a “ship to test” beta of the App Studio to a limited number of third-party developer partners. These partners have a vested interest in the success of App Studio and provided excellent, insightful feedback into how to improve the experience.
Based on the insight gained from that initial beta release as well as the general rollout, and from ongoing feedback from developers, we have continued to release iterations of the App Studio, and have developed an ongoing improvement roadmap to address concerns and to provide additional utility to our developers.
The Design
The ActiveCampaign App Studio was one of the most challenging projects I’ve ever worked on. Designing for engineers presents a unique set of challenges that many product designers do not normally face. This challenge was made even more difficult by the necessity of making the tool still usable by our non-technical, marketing-focused users.
By leaning heavily on the insight provided both by our in-house engineers and third-party developers, we created a system that is a blend of highly technical and easily approachable.
The ‘Build’ step in App Studio, pre-filled with a skeleton config and showing the ‘Valerie’ validation panel.
The heart of the App Studio is the app configuration file. This is a JSON file that is edited by the third-party developer to configure API endpoints, craft workflows, and construct the UI for their app.
The app configuration controls everything about an app and it’s connection to AC:
The config provides:
- Access to UI elements for connection, setup, and data mapping
- AC API access
- Third-party webhook configuration
Whenever a new capability is added to an app the App Ecosystem team makes this a ‘platform capability’ and adds it to the config so it can be used by all future apps.
The Config
Validation with Valerie
Testing with Valerie while working on an app config.
Valerie is what we call the suite of validation tools that ensure all apps built within App Studio are configured properly and will function as intended. Valerie runs constantly while an config is being built, and gives real-time feedback on the validity of the app. We have plans in the works to build a CLI version of Valerie that will live directly within a third-party developer’s personal development environment.
App Studio also provides a full sandbox experience so developers can test their app. The sandbox allows a developer to see and use their app in the exact same way the end-user would.
All the Rest:
Version Management, Listing Details, Error Logging, and Publication
App version management
Once an app has been built, the developer needs tools to list and manage the app as it continues to evolve. We’ve provided robust version management and error logging tools to allow for easy iteration on existing apps, and a suite of tools to craft a beautiful and informative app listing to market the app within the ActiveCampaign App Marketplace.
Detailed error logging helps developers troubleshoot and iterate
Future Challenges and Opportunities
The App Studio roadmap continues to grow and evolve, and the App Ecosystem team has a lot of exciting plans for continued iteration and development. Some of these include:
No code app builder for marketers utilizing the Action Framework
UI-less App Studio as a CLI that works within a dev’s own environment
App templates so developers can spin up new apps even more quickly
A ‘universal app experience’ that will provide apps with enhanced functionality beyond automations
Increased integration of apps and the new AC custom objects framework to provide apps with even more flexibility and power
“One of the best developer portals we’ve used. It’s great to have access to auth, webhooks, and workflows all in one place.”