Sonnet AI Interface Design

An interface for AI-assisted email drafting.

Context

Sonnet AI is a startup that seeks to optimize how companies draft sales and marketing emails. To facilitate the email drafting process, it populates emails with AI-generated contents.

As part of the Brown's CS1300, my team and I worked on an initial design for its email writing and sending interface.

Problem Statement

As a first step, the team curated a list of top requirements:

  • The app should target the largest possible number of new users.
  • It should be as familiar to the users, especially the following main elements:
    1. A directory structure to organize clients into various categories.
    2. An email-writing panel.

Sketching

To explore various different designs for the project, the team made sketches with pen and paper.

Creating the Hi Definition Mockup

We then merged different ideas into one mockup and demoed to other teams. We heard the critique that the "Pinterest" view seems to offer a duplicate functionality to the directory view. The team decided to use only the directory view in our app.

Assessing the Interface with User Testing

As a final step, we sent the app to paid testers on usertesting.com. Here is a summary of their reviews:

  1. The users appreciated our contact management feature.
  2. The users wish to know what a more complex design looks like.
  3. Overall, they liked the visual elements in the design.

Conclusion and Further Work

The user testing confirmed our impression that clients management is important. If we were to create the app, we could further refine this functionality. There seems a potential that it grows into a separate but related app to the email drafting feature.