Smart Check

Beefree is a drag-and-drop HTML email builder for marketers, agencies, and enterprise teams. I was the solo designer on this project, working with a Product Manager, Frontend/Backend engineers, and QA over 6+ months.

Users were catching critical errors (broken links, oversized images, poor color contrast) after exporting or after sending their email. Way too late. Manual pre-send checks were slow and unreliable, and there was nothing built into the editor to help.

We got signals from interviews, surveys, and sales calls to map the problem, then ran dedicated interviews to understand context and priority. A survey helped us prioritize which checks actually mattered most to users.

The process followed Shape Up best practices: problem definition, shaping, validation, dev cycle, release, and iteration.

A big chunk of shaping was invisible work: mapping how Smart Check would behave across roles, plans, and permissions. We also did a technical feasibility pass early to understand what we were actually able to build.

The hardest constraint was the UI: we couldn't redesign the entire editor, so we had to add a new icon to an already crowded header. That made naming and discoverability even more critical.

Usability testing shaped the icon, name, and UX copy. Post-launch, we added an animation to the icon and it moved the needle significantly. User feedback wasn't complaints—it was requests for more checks. That's a good sign.