Collaboration
UI/UX • Research
Project overview
The purpose of this project was to explore a better way for users to collaborate within the product. Our users' success depended on our ability to enable teamwork which would lead to better results, greater innovation, and higher productivity- a core collaborative experience was critical.
My role
I helped to launch the new collaboration experience within Watson Analytics in 2018 and continued to iterate to improve the experience. Below are some of the bigger projects I worked on as a design lead for this project.
Problems
It was hard for our users to work together with their stakeholders. When our users wanted to share an issue they found in a dashboard, they usually:
1. Took a screenshot of the dashboard
2. Imported the screenshot to PowerPoint
3. Added arrows or shapes to the screenshot to highlight the issue
4. Exported the edited screenshot
5. Shared it with their stakeholders via email
The conversation would carry on between the stakeholders via an email thread. To communicate in context with each other, the stakeholders would take multiple screenshots and include them as attachments. This usually become an email thread nightmare, and communication is cumbersome and inefficient for all involved
Market research
We started by researching the market trends for collaboration...
User interview
To get quality insights from the customers, we conducted interviews with 14 of our clients. I worked together with Lisa Chen (Design strategist) to formulate a questionnaire for our users.
Below are the key insights we found through our user interviews which we addressed in order to create a delightful collaborative experience:
Design process
- Interviewed clients to understand more about their pain points and understand how the users typically work with each other
- Conducted an environmental scan to see what our competitors were doing
- Facilitated working session with the product manager and lead developer over mural.ly to identify issues and iterate on solutions
- Worked with junior designers on sketches and wireframes
- Shared the outcomes with stakeholders
- Worked with a researcher on a testing plan
- Collected feedback from users via testing sessions
- Created High-fi mockups and prototypes
Solutions
Scenario: Claire, the National Sales Manager for Bike Share America, builds a dashboard to compare KPIs for different cities and then operationalizes it to share with her regional managers.
Claire notices the sale is trending downward.
She enters the annotation mode.
She highlights the section she wants her Sales Manager (Rickie) to pay attention to.
She then writes a comment for Rickie.
Scenario: Ricki receives an in-app notification that Claire left a new comment in the latest Bikeshare Trends dashboard.
Ricki sees Claire's comment.
She reads Claire's message and an investigation on the issue.
After the investigation, Ricki responds to Claire’s comment.
Scenario: After Claire reviews Ricki's comment, she feels her concerns have been addressed by Ricki and marks the comment as "resolved."
Scenario: Claire needs to share the dashboard with stakeholders who don't have access to the product. Most of her stakeholders are on Slack.
She shares the dashboard via Slack without leaving the app. She marks-up the dashboard and includes it as an image.
The message she composes in-app will appear on Slack
Learning & next steps
- More users began collaborating within Watson Analytics
- We learned that collaboration is a high-value area to invest in. We started to look into including more collaboration experiences in the product such as real-time collaboration, suggesting relevant content and passive paper trail