Popmenu is a dynamic restaurant marketing platform that helps users engage their customers through personalized emails, text messages, and social posts — all while tracking performance across channels. I was tasked with creating a unified marketing experience that brings these tools together into a single, goal-driven workflow. The result was a centralized Campaigns hub that streamlines navigation, improves usability, and lays the groundwork for AI-powered marketing.
Popmenu’s marketing tools were siloed — each channel (email, text messages, social posting) operated independently, with no shared content or visibility across touch points. This made it difficult for users to plan, manage, or measure multi-channel marketing efforts, or quickly make content.
At the same time, competitors were shifting toward campaign-centric models that grouped content by goal and timing — not by delivery method. With new AI-generated content features on the horizon, our legacy creation needed a strategic redesign.
We started by simplifying the global navigation: all marketing tools were moved under a new Campaigns tab, while Automated Emails were given their own dedicated space. For the initial release, I intentionally preserved the existing creation flows for each channel to reduce friction and ease users into the new model.
Instead of overhauling everything at once, we introduced a shared system of record — a central table and calendar — to unify marketing efforts across channels. This approach gave users a clear sense of what was going out, when, and to whom, regardless of delivery method.
Shifting from channel-based to goal-based thinking required re-educating users — and rethinking how we presented content creation, scheduling, and organization.We ran a series of iterative usability tests using Maze, with a focus on mental models and discoverability:
Week 1 – Internal screener with the UX team to validate concepts
Week 2 – Testing with internal “power users,” familiar with restaurant marketing
Week 3 – Paid Maze testers unfamiliar with Popmenu to ensure intuitive design
Users relied on the table to manage multiple campaigns at scale — especially when filtering by goal, channel, or location. The calendar helped users identify content gaps and plan by date, not just campaign type. Based on this feedback and competitive research, we chose to make the table the default view for Campaigns while retaining easy access to the calendar.
After launching the unified Campaigns experience, we introduced a new layer of intelligence: AI-generated multichannel campaigns. This feature allowed users to either create traditional, single-channel campaigns or opt into automated, event-based campaigns generated from calendar moments or new menu items.
Popmenu could now recommend up to three coordinated marketing touch points — email, text message, and social post — all pre-filled with content tailored to the event. To balance automation with control, I designed a stepper-based review flow that guided users through editing copy and images, approving or deleting individual channels, and understanding how and when content would be delivered.
This approach maintained transparency and user trust while reducing the time and effort required to build full-funnel marketing campaigns. It also showcased the value of our AI capabilities without forcing users into a black-box workflow.
My biggest takeaway from both research and testing is that the fewer barriers users face when creating content, the more likely they are to engage with our tools and recognize their value.
To support continued growth of the campaign feature, it's essential to clearly communicate its impact through dashboards, recap emails, and revenue callouts across the product. We'll also keep advancing our goal of making content creation effortless by offering more granular, customizable premade content.
