Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation platform that helps businesses create, send, and analyze email campaigns. In my time there, Mailchimp grew from a team of 35, supporting ~240k users, to a 500+ employee company with over 10 million accounts. I wore many hats over my 6 years at Mailchimp, most of which were UX and front-end focused.
Role: Lead UX Developer & Product Team Lead
Tenure: Mar 2010 – Jun 2016 (6 yrs 6 mos)
Location: Atlanta, GA
Business Impact
- Led the standardization of Mailchimp’s front-end code, creating the foundations of our design system
- Improved user onboarding, feature discoverability, and personalization to keep users engaged over time.
- Helped build Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop email editor, which revolutionized the way users designed emails
- Wrote for, edited, and helped plan our team’s external publication, The UX Newsletter
- Spoke at conferences, participated in panels, and invited in guest speakers to strengthen the company’s industry presence
Project Highlights
Design System
When I joined Mailchimp in 2010, the web app’s front end was full of bespoke styles and UI elements custom-built for each feature addition. To speed up development and prepare for a major redesign, I began consolidating common components into a UI pattern library. By standardizing our grid, buttons, form fields, modals, and more, we established a shared visual and functional language across the product. This library not only streamlined development but also laid the groundwork for a more scalable and cohesive design system.
Learn more in my blog post about the evolution of Mailchimp’s pattern library.
Drag and Drop Editor
One of Mailchimp’s biggest selling points in the early days was its vast collection of email templates. Even with this growing library of quality templates, many of our customers were seeking more options and more layout control. They wanted a modular system for designing HTML emails. In 2012, I was part of a tiger team that set out to build a drag-and-drop editor. Codenamed “Neapolitan,” the new editor quickly became one of the app’s most popular features.
Read my Mailchimp blog post about the new editor. (Internet Archive)
Chart Library Flash Migration
Mailchimp has always leveraged data visualization to help users understand campaign performance, audience insights, a/b test results, and more. When I joined, though, most of those charts were still rendered in Flash. As we pushed toward responsive design for the Mailchimp web application, we wanted to make our charts accessible on mobile devices. I led the effort to migrate all our Flash charts to an HTML5-based library.
Read my Mailchimp blog post about the chart upgrade. (Internet Archive)
