For those of you who aren’t intimately familiar with Iterable Studio, this is our journey builder, formerly known as “Workflow Studio.” This is the place within the Iterable platform where marketers build a variety of customer journeys like welcome flows, purchase follow-ups, abandoned cart sequences, and re-engagement flows. This is where the magic happens.
What looks like a beautiful refresh to our well-worn and well-loved Workflow Studio, is in fact a complete rewrite of every feature and every interaction. Why overhaul Iterable Studio? Marketers spend a lot of time building, tweaking, and reviewing performance of their journeys. As one of Iterable’s most used products, we wanted Studio to sing!
The Updates
While many of our customers had gotten used to the old design, and had plenty of habits and workarounds to make it work the way they wanted, the experience of building out workflows felt stodgy, where we wanted light, easy, delightful, and joy-inducing.
Connie Chan, our designer extraordinaire, reinvented how a user would interact with Studio, leveraging our new design language, Aurora. The goal: to make it much easier and faster for marketers to build out their journeys by adding lots of space, intuitive patterns, and all of the needed resources. Throughout the process, she asked customers to play with prototypes to confirm their understanding of updates to the user experience and determine ways we could make it even easier to use.
We also wanted to make sure that we were using language that made sense and felt good. Along with a dated design, the old Workflow Studio used a lot of jargon—workflows, nodes, fields match, field split, oh my! We worked with our docs writer, Elizabeth Mills, who not only helped us include more user-friendly language, she also worked with Connie and I to explore user interactions, to make sure they were as simple as possible. As we worked to update the language in Studio, we interviewed our customers to find out which words best aligned with their function.
Getting User Feedback
It was important to start getting user feedback as early as possible—not just through prototypes and interviews, but directly from marketers using the new Studio.To that end, we decided to launch our beta with a subset of the full Studio functionality. We focused on building out the most critical features first and gave marketers the ability to hop back and forth between the classic Workflow Studio and the new Studio, so that their work wouldn’t be interrupted, and we could still learn as much as possible.
We learned how our customers interacted with the new Studio over zoom kick-off calls, where they shared their screen and all of the places they stumbled. This gave us great insights into what was easy to understand and what we needed to rework.
In March we opened the floodgates, giving everyone the opportunity to try out the new Studio—and we learned a lot more! Every customer is unique, with different ways of using data and configuring journeys, and we definitely found opportunities to further improve Studio.
And now, the new Studio is the only Studio. The old Workflow Studio is enjoying retirement.🌴
New Features in Iterable Studio
What are some of the features we’re most excited about? Besides the gorgeous design?! Here are my favorites:
- Send to Journey: We’ve made it super easy to flow users from one journey to another. You can create a new journey to send users to, right within the journey you’re building, and they’ll be automatically linked.
- Notes: With notes, you can remind yourself why you set something up a certain way, collaborate with others, ask for reviews, and just generally better document the robust, impressively complicated journeys you’re building! We’re so thrilled to be able to help with this new feature.
- Analytics in Studio: With analytics in studio, it’s much easier to compare metrics across campaigns so you can see opportunities for optimization.
What’s even more exciting? The new Iterable Studio is much easier to build upon. We’ve got a slew of new features coming to Studio that we can’t wait to share with you. Here’s what’s coming soon:
- Drafts: Drafts allow you to edit a journey in the background while your users continue through the published version of your journey as usual. Edit some tiles, get a teammate to review your draft, and publish your changes when you’re ready.
- Tilesets: Build journeys quickly and more efficiently by dropping in common patterns that you use a lot. Tilesets are a collection of tiles, connectors, and notes that you can create from a journey you’ve previously built. You can insert a tileset into any journey that you are building (within the same project). This was a Hack Week project, dreamt up by our genius engineers who were looking for a way to simplify your process. I definitely work with a dream team!
- Exit Rules: Set rules that, when matched, will exit customers from a journey. For example, once a customer has made a purchase, you might want to remove them from the abandoned cart journey that they were moving through.
This is just the start—we have a LOT more in the works and coming your way soon. We really hope that you’re loving the new Iterable Studio, and are excited about what’s coming. And, if you are using the new Studio, we’d love to hear from you! Use the feedback button in Studio to share your thoughts. We take your feedback very seriously so please, keep it coming!
Want to get your eyes on the new Studio? Check out our Spring release webinar.
