Just a heads-up. When we launch MailChimp v5.3 in a few weeks, you’ll notice some subtle changes to our UI design. This is merely phase one of what’s probably a three-phase process of re-building our interface in order to 1) match some upcoming branding tweaks we’re going through (which you can get a taste of here), 2) to refine our CSS, and 3) to enable us to give customers the ability to re-skin our app.
Here’s a snippet:
The current design is on the left. The new look (or at least the beginnings of our new look) is on the right.
A little Helvetica goes a long way.
I was really hoping for Comic Sans, too.
Duly noted.
Categorically denied.
:-)
(comic book guy from Simpsons)
Piece of cake for you designers:
$(“#mailchimp”).addClass(“botox”);
Yes, we are going for a “tighter” look, so botox would work nicely. Ha.
How about a new iPhone app UI, including ability to see the actual full CTR percentages instead of rounding up, and more functionality? This stuff I could care less about, it seems unworthy of a new update. But the iPhone app, that one’s not only overdue, it’s begging!
in the works.
I vote for prioritizing the Iphone app. How about letting us put in a first and last name as well as the email address when adding a person to the list? – and let us choose the area of interest as well?
Thanks. Love the app.
Hi Schmuel, when we built the first iPhone app, we outsourced most of it. That’s because we weren’t sure how our customers would like it, and we wanted to minimize our risk. The company that built it did an outstanding job, but they’re not an email marketing company at heart. I think we can pick up where they left off, and take this app to a new level. In our most recent newsletter, we announced how we’ve started up our own in-house Mobile Lab. We’ve hired two excellent mobile app developers who specialize in iPhone. Prior to that, we brought on a senior developer with Android and Blackberry expertise. We’ll post more details on our mobile initiatives soon, but wanted to reassure you that our iPhone app (and all mobile apps) are an extremely high priority here. Enough so that we’ve built entire departments around them. Their work is independent of the facelift work I described here. Thanks for taking the time to send us some feedback.
Great to hear Ben. I hope you can also prioritize support for customers who have custom google apps domains in the not-too-distant future.
I actually prefer some aspects of the old design, particularly the blue bar at the top. the new design is looking a bit dull?
how about a better integration with Salesforce.com?
Hi Katherine, the developers that work on our salesforce integration are listening here:
http://jungle.mailchimp.com/group/salesforce/forum/topics/feedback-please-new-mailchimp
Wicked.
Love the new layout. The current iteration always felt a bit busy with all the different colours / gradients / bars.
I like how the new design has minimized a lot of that noise– the result seems to be a much tighter, focused design.
–And don’t de-prioritize the new design! Those changes are definitely equally important! (as I’m sure you know)
Thanks, Steve. Yep, the re-design is happening at the same time as lots and lots of other development (in the app, and in mobile). These things aren’t mutually exclusive.
“the ability to re-skin our app”… Please tell me this is referencing my favorite term “White Label”…. Pretty Please?
Hi Brian,
White label, as in “I want to rebrand MailChimp so that I can re-sell this to customers as my own product” is something we’re not interested in doing. I never say never, but I can tell you that we’ve tried that once. We didn’t like it. It felt like when Apple briefly tried to allow clones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone
If the product and the email eco-system was more mature, we’d probably consider it. But right now, we want to maintain full control of the app and our brand, and innovate like hell. Also, we think that if you don’t have a full-fledged abuse desk and deliverability team in-house, you probably don’t want to try to be an ESP.
What’s intriguing to us is the ability to re-skin MailChimp to personalize it a little. Like you’d do with your twitter account, or your intranet. When I setup web apps for our company to use, I like to upload our little logo, and change some colors around. Similarly, when creative people setup MailChimp for a client, we’d like to make it easy for them to customize the look of our app a little bit. Just to make it more comfy for the client. That’s all. But that’s a long way out. In v5.3, this little “botox” treatment is just to lay the foundation.
Step 1: Code cleanup and UI standardization. That’s what’s happening now.
Step two: re-organize UI to accommodate customization. Probably QTR1.
Final Step: re-skin the app. Realistically, all I can say is we’ll be here sometime in 2011. But the more we work on this, the more excited we get about giving our customers this option, so it could happen pretty fast.
Sorry if that’s not what you were hoping for in terms of a “white label” option. Just wanted to set expectations.
Ben thank you for the amazing response to my comment. Even though the phrase “I want to rebrand MailChimp so that I can re-sell this to customers as my own product” made me re-think how cool/not cool the whole concept of white label products/services are, ultimately I love MailChimp more for what you’re trying to achieve. I also learned a great history lesson about Mac clones.
Keep up the good work!
I have kept an eye on mailchimp for a long time, and it is a pitty you dont want to alow white labeling.
Awesome to use as a tool for us. But as a business it does not make sense to move our customers over i.t.o the profit loss.
Maybe a multi account manager , and twitterlike skinning option, stil branded as Mailchimp, but with a decent reseller structure ?
just my 2c
Hi Koegies,
twitter-like skinning = (working on it)
Multi-account management = http://blog.mailchimp.com/manage-multiple-accounts-with-the-mailchimp-keychain/
decent reseller structure = Creative Agency Discount http://blog.mailchimp.com/about/partnerships
also see:
EEP Program http://blog.mailchimp.com/re-vamped-experts-directory/
“Re-brandable reports: http://blog.mailchimp.com/re-brandable-campaign-reports-in-mailchimp/
Nice work. Time for a banana break!
Good stuff. I agree with Steve. The current design feels really busy and a lot of mental work to use.
I would also love to see the possibility of 1 page instead of multi-page processes. I’d rather not have to navigate between sections and just do it all on one screen.
Yeah, that’s really hard to balance the combination of a lot of steps in one screen (which we do a lot of now), while keeping it very easy to use, easy to update, and fast to load. But we’ve got some of the best in the business here, and they’re focused very hard on this.
Sorry, I re-read my comment and it was a bit negative (there are enough negative people posting on blogs in the world to have me add to them!)
It needed the balance of your service and feature set is amazing! I guess I’m just excited to see you improve the UI.
how about a simple mobile site for logging in to view stats of current campaigns, e.g. blackberry browser not too chimp-friendly
Have you tried minichimp.com ? It’s a Blackberry app for MailChimp built by some awesome programmer.
Yes, try minichimp… It’s right what you need.
If only it could manage multiple accounts :(
(and talking about facelifts… that it could be skinned too :) )
Perhaps Minichimp needs to be bought by a bigger company (hint hint!!!)
“enable us to give customers the ability to re-skin our app.” – does this mean that you’ll be enabling white labeling of your product sometime soon?
oops – re-read the posts above and I see that white labeling isn’t what you had in mind…
Firstly – great customer service with regards to responding to posts!
Is it possible use your API to get the re-brandable reports to show in a website,in other words to allow my clients to login and see the reports, rather than having to share a link manually?
Thanks
It’s possible to use our API to generate your own completely custom reports, which is how most people do it. I think if you’re going to go through the API, might as well go all out and roll your own reports. But I’ve heard of some people possibly embedding the VIP reports into IFRAMES (?)
I’d try searching/asking at the MailChimp API discussion group:
http://groups.google.com/group/mailchimp-api-discuss
[...] MailChimp app is changing too A few months ago, we started optimizing the app’s design, so that it could be easily co-branded or customized to match your company’s brand. We [...]
[...] few months ago, we started optimizing the app’s design, so that it could be easily co-branded or customized to match your company’s brand. We won’t [...]