Here at MailChimp, we’re realists—as much as we love email and all the things you can do with it, we understand that building a campaign is a task, not a life event. You want to get in, get done, and get on with things. Duly noted.

Our secret cadre of worker bees recently unveiled our new drag-and-drop editor, codenamed Neapolitan.

We think it’s pretty neat, and we’ve heard from lots of customers that they’re building campaigns faster these days. But it got us thinking: what else could we do to make building a campaign faster and easier?

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It’s been a busy few weeks since we released our new drag and drop editor. While we were working hard on changes and features, we also paid attention to the tweets, blog comments, and feedback coming in about it. Most of what we’ve heard has been pure excitement (yay!), but we also picked up a bunch of ideas for making it better. Several of those concepts made it into this week’s v7.8 release. Ben already gave a good overview of the v7.8 changes a few days ago, but I thought I’d share more details on our changes to the editor.

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Next week, we’re launching some new features in MailChimp. As usual, we’ll begin rolling out the changes on Monday, and it’ll take about three days to get propagated to all 2.5 million user accounts.

Here’s what’s coming:

1. Search for campaigns from Dashboard
2. More enhancements to drag and drop editor: social modules, keyboard shortcuts, right-to-left text, A/B tests, and RSS
3. Session handling improvements

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12/7/2012: We just rolled out some updates to the new editor. Read about them here.

I was kidnapped! All I remember is that one day I was quietly working at my desk in the UX department, and the next I was relocated to a secret office with a small, multidisciplinary team of other chimps. At first, very few people in the company even knew where we had moved to, much less that we were working on the next generation editor for MailChimp. How could anyone know when we were toiling away behind a closed door with paper taped over the glass? Printed on that sheet of paper, though, was a clue.

Code Name: Neapolitan

Like all good covert operations, we had to have a code name. We chose Neapolitan for several reasons. First off, the word comes from the Greek name for Naples (the birthplace of pizza…mmm, pizza), Neapolis, meaning “New City.” Very appropriate for a part of the app where MailChimp users spend the most time. Also, we love ice cream, and Neapolitan ice cream consists of different blocks, layered in a single container. So there you have it, a word with ties to two delicious food items that helps define the design criteria for our new editor:

1. Make the process of building emails better.
2. Provide different types of content blocks for email creators to drop in.
3. Make it simple to edit content, change design, and rearrange content blocks.
4. Update the campaign preview in real time, with every change.
5. All templates created with the new editor have to be mobile friendly, resizing down to fit phone screens in modern email clients that support media queries.

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