LEADING ON SOLUTIONS FIRST EXPERIENCES

refining the core product to be more simple, contextual, and understandable.

Smartsheet is a very deep and powerful tool that has an incredible breadth of features available to users. This allows it to be very useful when a user grasps the number of options available to them to solve a given task. The challenge that I worked to solve was bridging the gap between new users and those with a greater familiarity with the tool set. This i did from a number of different feature initiatives including updating the home experience, making changes to create a more robust global search, and in designing an implementing a forms experience that considered different perspectives on how to engage with core product from a non gird-centric perspective.

Workspaces

Mapping the Experience

The core product space consists a complex number of interrelated tools and components. These were often owned by different teams with their own roadmaps on future feature development. In order to ensure that all partners and other design pillars were aligned I captured the connections in this and other documents. Once done i scheduled regular meetings to validate where there was overlap so as requirements were gathered and established there was no miscommunication about ownership, alignment and sign off. Establishing this process early on helped the SFE (Solutions First Experiences) team during not only initial feature development for Workspaces, Home, and Global Navigation but also as we looked at future work that was much further out on our roadmap.

Understanding the global environment and related touch points

I worked to extrapolate out the interconnection of my core feature work with other product experiences and internal partners so i could understand and limit downstream scope issues. This allowed my team to more rapidly get sign off with leadership on the level of intended design work expected from the SFE team. This also helped surface unknown impacts to other design teams schedules on their product release dates. This was a living document that was updated and shared as new work was accomplished by other teams helping to create a source of truth and clarity between SFE and our partners.

LOW-FI EXPLORATIONS, Iterative DESIGN, VERSION 1

Workspaces was an attempt to help users organize the large sets of documents into more understandable project structures. Thus many of my early concepts followed similar patterns for project management. As requirements were refined and with input from users through our internal research team I identified that greater flexibility and functionality would likely be needed and requested by users to accommodate their use cases. I worked to consider the this however to meet initial deadlines and to validate assumptions the first version was very paired back and simplified. The first version was built and shared with users with positive feedback however there were a number of questions about the depth of the experience which i had raised and started working on solutions for in future iterations.

LOOKING FORWARD

Understanding user needs were more complex and the organization of project and documents could be greatly expanded. I provided a number of conceptual ideas and designs to support this including laying within the left panel a number of nested drag and drop options. Other designs ideas considered how documents could be linked within automation flows allowing for greater control over permissions, sharing and version control. A lot of the work that I did was to leverage the many complex tools into Workspaces into seamless experiences that understood the unique and varied use cases of our user base. With the support of leadership I led my team in diving into ways the UI could start with simplistic but expand in complexity as the users needs of the product increased.

HOME

One of the greatest challenges known of the core product is that it has a steep learning curve. This was evident from research and personal experience when i first entered the product. The home page doesn’t offer a clear pathways into the product for new users exploring it capabilities. With that in mind and a directive by leadership to find a solution to give greater engagement with the home page to help introduce new and returning users to solutions i set about to make a number changes. this included surfacing information, projects, notifications, shares and other important elements that require a users attention at a high level. Additionally I looked at what metadata was needed at a scan to help navigate users to specific docs, spreadsheets etc. Lastly with the help of the templates team I worked to design in a opinion on what new users might see depending on a number of variables including their organization, the reason they are working with the tool and previous work they have completed.

HOME Exploration

USER VALIDATION & STAKEHOLDER ALIGNMENT

The home page experience required as we dove deep a number of partnerships with other teams and this gave us insight into ways we could surface important tools to larger workflows for users. This collaborative process also pushed us into greater strategic alignment on business objectives because there were so many layers of UI complexity that could cause downstream impacts that needed to be considered. Thus many meetings and source documents were created to ensure nothing was be forgotten. From the work that was done by myself and my team including ways to help communicate and surface how users could interact at a high level with their data we also learned how forgotten yet important global search had become to users to navigate the core product.

GLOBAL NAVIGATION

I worked closely with the design director, product and search teams to resolve several issues with navigation. I examined the current UI and found several issues including a junk drawer for many features. As shown i did an audit of the current experience and found that a number of interactions were confusing or unclear. I further found that many features could be incorporated into tools already established in the UI in ways that were more intuitive so users were sent looking. Thus through design iteration I explored several UI options and layouts pushing the envelop in terms of customization & personalization, value, and feature integration for scalability knowing future features would need clear methodologies for integration.

UNCLEAR WAYFINDING

condensing ideas down to the most successful

Navigation Looking forward

Through many conversations and discussions, I was able to identify a pathway forward using a similar model with other very familiar tools like Slack. I pushed our product partners for greater levels of customization knowing that users would have different needs and supporting these use cases would allow for increased levels of interaction and usage. This was also important as the other option found was a complete integration and change to present global search patterns. This was outside of the scope and interest of Sr. Leadership so allowing for that functionality at this level would greatly increase usage of these navigation tools.

SOLUTIONS FIRST EXPERIENCE RESULTS

CROSS TEAM ALIGNMENT

I established several process that helped keep myself and my team's relationship with other internal partners effective. Product/feature architecture maps including a high-level breakdown of ownership ensured all parties knew what was on the horizon and actively in design. Figjams provided a way for users to work collaboratively both in conceptualization and in reviews. Large team share-out's also aided in communicating in progress work and helped foster ideas.

DESIGN BEST PRACTICES

From the testing of new ways for how my team worked through our designs, I established several processes including a review process to ensure that work was signed off by the appropriate partners.

FEEDBACK

Understanding that there would challenges to some of the processes I ensured that my partners and reports knew I was available and open for feedback and alternatives. Establishing regular open office hours, team meetings, and setting open discussion times on design meetings allowed for new ideas and solutions to be presented which I worked to incorporate into any framework I had ownership over.