Design a collaborative knowledge management system from 0 to 1
Thoughts helps teams to collectively create, edit, share, access internal documentations across company boundaries.
From the very beginning, I took on the role of the main UX designer for this product, guiding it from the conceptual stage to its launch. Throughout this journey, I led the feature ideation, facilitated design iterations, and fostered collaboration across multiple teams, including design, development, marketing, sales, and customer success.
♦︎ Summary
During my tenure at the company, our primary offering was Teambition, a cloud-based project management and collaboration platform. As part of our expansion plans, we identified a promising business opportunity in the form of a collaborative knowledge management system that would address the existing functional gaps in our main product while entering a relatively untapped market.
Priority Matrix
High Impact
Introducing this product was a key strategy for the company to expand and boost revenue.
High Effort
This is the largest project undertaken by the company in the past two years, involved a domain that the team was unfamiliar with.
Challenges
Cross-department collaboration for product design
It required intricate cross-department collaboration, involving customer success, sales, and marketing department, to align the product design with business goals.
Unforeseen tech restrictions
The development team lacked prior experience in collaborative document editing products, leading to a series of unforeseen technical constraints emerging before the design phase began.
Ambiguity
The project commenced with a vague goal and unclear direction.
Tight deadline
Our product design and development cycle is notably brief, especially when compared to competitors with significantly larger teams.
♦︎ Discover
Target Users
In our early-stage business strategy, we employed an upselling approach for our primary product, Teambition, concurrently showcasing the advantages of our collaborative knowledge management platform. This strategy aimed to capture the same user base as Teambition, primarily comprising professionals from small to medium-sized businesses in four major industries: technology, advertising agencies, law firms, and construction companies.
Target users
Young professionals from small to medium-sized companies who collaboratively engage in writing, reading, and sharing internal team documentation.
Competitors
Based on our user research and competitive analysis, we identified several opportunities where we can enhance our offerings to surpass their user experiences.
Teambition
Limited support for rich text documents.
No support for document organization.
Confluence
Steep learning curve.
Outdated UI (at that time)
Evernote
Limited collaborative features.
Limited support for document organization.
Office 365
Excessively priced for small to medium-sized business owners.
Not user-friendly for organizing documentations.
Notably, Teambition is highlighted above as we strive to offer an improved collaborative knowledge management platform, intended to replace the Post feature in our primary product.
♦︎ Define
User Goal
Our user goal is to provide features that are specifically designed for collaborative knowledge management scenarios for small to medium-business users.
Business Goal
Our business goal is to upsell our services to our existing customer base (SMB in particular), from our main product Teambition, to increase revenue.
Core Loop
The core loop of the product embody the most frequent steps users take in their workflow. Users emphasizing document editing follow a distinct core loop from those focused on reading documents. In the context of an early knowledge management product, where the primary goal is assisting customers in building their knowledge system, the core loop of an editor encapsulates the most prevalent use cases. Consequently, we prioritized these three feature sets.
Feature Map
Derived from our product's core loop, feature requests stem from user requirements for editing, organizing, and sharing documents. This feature map serves as a guide for building the necessary components to make the MVP function effectively.
♦︎ Deliver
Final Design
While numerous design details were considered, I will highlight the pivotal ones that resonated most with our target customers.
Feature overview
Key Features
Share
Document-sharing with
Permission Control
Permission control allows the administrators implement confidential protocols as well as giving team members the flexibility to access the document.
Public link and password
invite members outside of the organization to view or edit the document and comply with local laws where document-sharing service could not provide direct link of viewing the document.
Permission hierarchy inherit
members automatically obtain relevant permissions through the role they have in the parent document without extra permission request to administrators.
Role control
grant different permissions by assigning roles.
Try mousing over
Organize
Nested-page navigation helps the users to organized the documentations and makes it easier for others to look up them.
Organize Documentations with
Nested-page Navigation
Synchronized Sorting
All the members will see the same sorting to ensure a consistent reading experience across the organization.
Create Child-document with One Click
A shortcut to create a child-document, and member will inherit permissions without further configurations.
Drag & Drop
Organize the document tree by drag and drop.
Collapsable Panel
Users can hide the navigation and focus on the writing.
Try mousing over
Results
After six months of dedicated effort, the product was successfully rolled out internally for testing purposes. We were on the verge of meeting our success metrics, as the product effectively served as a reliable platform for hosting our team's knowledge base. The only missing element was the ability to insert tables, which we swiftly designed and implemented.
With this crucial feature in place, the product had reached a stage where it was prepared for the public, marking an important milestone in its development.
The portfolio space is designed for desktop viewing. Please note that you might experience some display or interaction issues, as certain features and interactions have not been fully optimized for mobile devices, yet.
Design a collaborative knowledge management system from 0 to 1
Thoughts helps teams to collectively create, edit, share, access internal documentations across company boundaries.
From the very beginning, I took on the role of the main UX designer for this product, guiding it from the conceptual stage to its launch. Throughout this journey, I led the feature ideation, facilitated design iterations, and fostered collaboration across multiple teams, including design, development, marketing, sales, and customer success.
♦︎ Summary
During my tenure at the company, our primary offering was Teambition, a cloud-based project management and collaboration platform. As part of our expansion plans, we identified a promising business opportunity in the form of a collaborative knowledge management system that would address the existing functional gaps in our main product while entering a relatively untapped market.
Priority Matrix
High Impact
Introducing this product was a key strategy for the company to expand and boost revenue.
High Effort
This is the largest project undertaken by the company in the past two years, involved a domain that the team was unfamiliar with.
Challenges
Cross-department collaboration for product design
It required intricate cross-department collaboration, involving customer success, sales, and marketing department, to align the product design with business goals.
Unforeseen tech restrictions
The development team lacked prior experience in collaborative document editing products, leading to a series of unforeseen technical constraints emerging before the design phase began.
Ambiguity
The project commenced with a vague goal and unclear direction.
Tight deadline
Our product design and development cycle is notably brief, especially when compared to competitors with significantly larger teams.
♦︎ Discover
Target Users
In our early-stage business strategy, we employed an upselling approach for our primary product, Teambition, concurrently showcasing the advantages of our collaborative knowledge management platform. This strategy aimed to capture the same user base as Teambition, primarily comprising professionals from small to medium-sized businesses in four major industries: technology, advertising agencies, law firms, and construction companies.
Target users
Young professionals from small to medium-sized companies who collaboratively engage in writing, reading, and sharing internal team documentation.
Competitors
Based on our user research and competitive analysis, we identified several opportunities where we can enhance our offerings to surpass their user experiences.
Teambition
Limited support for rich text documents.
No support for document organization.
Confluence
Steep learning curve.
Outdated UI (at that time)
Evernote
Limited collaborative features.
Limited support for document organization.
Office 365
Excessively priced for small to medium-sized business owners.
Not user-friendly for organizing documentations.
Notably, Teambition is highlighted above as we strive to offer an improved collaborative knowledge management platform, intended to replace the Post feature in our primary product.
♦︎ Define
User Goal
Our user goal is to provide features that are specifically designed for collaborative knowledge management scenarios for small to medium-business users.
Business Goal
Our business goal is to upsell our services to our existing customer base (SMB in particular), from our main product Teambition, to increase revenue.
Core Loop
The core loop of the product embody the most frequent steps users take in their workflow. Users emphasizing document editing follow a distinct core loop from those focused on reading documents. In the context of an early knowledge management product, where the primary goal is assisting customers in building their knowledge system, the core loop of an editor encapsulates the most prevalent use cases. Consequently, we prioritized these three feature sets.
Feature Map
Derived from our product's core loop, feature requests stem from user requirements for editing, organizing, and sharing documents. This feature map serves as a guide for building the necessary components to make the MVP function effectively.
♦︎ Deliver
Final Design
While numerous design details were considered, I will highlight the pivotal ones that resonated most with our target customers.
Feature overview
Key Features
Share
Document-sharing with
Permission Control
Permission control allows the administrators implement confidential protocols as well as giving team members the flexibility to access the document.
Public link and password
invite members outside of the organization to view or edit the document and comply with local laws where document-sharing service could not provide direct link of viewing the document.
Permission hierarchy inherit
members automatically obtain relevant permissions through the role they have in the parent document without extra permission request to administrators.
Role control
grant different permissions by assigning roles.
Organize
Nested-page navigation helps the users to organized the documentations and makes it easier for others to look up them.
Organize Documentations with
Nested-page Navigation
Synchronized Sorting
All the members will see the same sorting to ensure a consistent reading experience across the organization.
Create Child-document with One Click
A shortcut to create a child-document, and member will inherit permissions without further configurations.
Drag & Drop
Organize the document tree by drag and drop.
Collapsable Panel
Users can hide the navigation and focus on the writing.
Results
After six months of dedicated effort, the product was successfully rolled out internally for testing purposes. We were on the verge of meeting our success metrics, as the product effectively served as a reliable platform for hosting our team's knowledge base. The only missing element was the ability to insert tables, which we swiftly designed and implemented.
With this crucial feature in place, the product had reached a stage where it was prepared for the public, marking an important milestone in its development.
The portfolio space is designed for desktop viewing. Please note that you might experience some display or interaction issues, as certain features and interactions have not been fully optimized for mobile devices, yet.
Design a collaborative knowledge management system from 0 to 1
Thoughts helps teams to collectively create, edit, share, access internal documentations across company boundaries.
From the very beginning, I took on the role of the main UX designer for this product, guiding it from the conceptual stage to its launch. Throughout this journey, I led the feature ideation, facilitated design iterations, and fostered collaboration across multiple teams, including design, development, marketing, sales, and customer success.
♦︎ Summary
During my tenure at the company, our primary offering was Teambition, a cloud-based project management and collaboration platform. As part of our expansion plans, we identified a promising business opportunity in the form of a collaborative knowledge management system that would address the existing functional gaps in our main product while entering a relatively untapped market.
Priority Matrix
High Impact
Introducing this product was a key strategy for the company to expand and boost revenue.
High Effort
This is the largest project undertaken by the company in the past two years, involved a domain that the team was unfamiliar with.
Challenges
Cross-department collaboration for product design
It required intricate cross-department collaboration, involving customer success, sales, and marketing department, to align the product design with business goals.
Unforeseen tech restrictions
The development team lacked prior experience in collaborative document editing products, leading to a series of unforeseen technical constraints emerging before the design phase began.
Ambiguity
The project commenced with a vague goal and unclear direction.
Tight deadline
Our product design and development cycle is notably brief, especially when compared to competitors with significantly larger teams.
♦︎ Discover
Target Users
In our early-stage business strategy, we employed an upselling approach for our primary product, Teambition, concurrently showcasing the advantages of our collaborative knowledge management platform. This strategy aimed to capture the same user base as Teambition, primarily comprising professionals from small to medium-sized businesses in four major industries: technology, advertising agencies, law firms, and construction companies.
Target users
Young professionals from small to medium-sized companies who collaboratively engage in writing, reading, and sharing internal team documentation.
Competitors
Based on our user research and competitive analysis, we identified several opportunities where we can enhance our offerings to surpass their user experiences.
Teambition
Limited support for rich text documents.
No support for document organization.
Confluence
Steep learning curve.
Outdated UI (at that time)
Evernote
Limited collaborative features.
Limited support for document organization.
Office 365
Excessively priced for small to medium-sized business owners.
Not user-friendly for organizing documentations.
Notably, Teambition is highlighted above as we strive to offer an improved collaborative knowledge management platform, intended to replace the Post feature in our primary product.
♦︎ Define
User Goal
Our user goal is to provide features that are specifically designed for collaborative knowledge management scenarios for small to medium-business users.
Business Goal
Our business goal is to upsell our services to our existing customer base (SMB in particular), from our main product Teambition, to increase revenue.
Core Loop
The core loop of the product embody the most frequent steps users take in their workflow. Users emphasizing document editing follow a distinct core loop from those focused on reading documents. In the context of an early knowledge management product, where the primary goal is assisting customers in building their knowledge system, the core loop of an editor encapsulates the most prevalent use cases. Consequently, we prioritized these three feature sets.
Feature Map
Derived from our product's core loop, feature requests stem from user requirements for editing, organizing, and sharing documents. This feature map serves as a guide for building the necessary components to make the MVP function effectively.
♦︎ Deliver
Final Design
While numerous design details were considered, I will highlight the pivotal ones that resonated most with our target customers.
Feature overview
Key Features
Share
Document-sharing with
Permission Control
Permission control allows the administrators implement confidential protocols as well as giving team members the flexibility to access the document.
Public link and password
invite members outside of the organization to view or edit the document and comply with local laws where document-sharing service could not provide direct link of viewing the document.
Permission hierarchy inherit
members automatically obtain relevant permissions through the role they have in the parent document without extra permission request to administrators.
Role control
grant different permissions by assigning roles.
Try mousing over
Organize
Nested-page navigation helps the users to organized the documentations and makes it easier for others to look up them.
Organize Documentations with
Nested-page Navigation
Synchronized Sorting
All the members will see the same sorting to ensure a consistent reading experience across the organization.
Create Child-document with One Click
A shortcut to create a child-document, and member will inherit permissions without further configurations.
Drag & Drop
Organize the document tree by drag and drop.
Collapsable Panel
Users can hide the navigation and focus on the writing.
Try mousing over
Results
After six months of dedicated effort, the product was successfully rolled out internally for testing purposes. We were on the verge of meeting our success metrics, as the product effectively served as a reliable platform for hosting our team's knowledge base. The only missing element was the ability to insert tables, which we swiftly designed and implemented.
With this crucial feature in place, the product had reached a stage where it was prepared for the public, marking an important milestone in its development.
The portfolio space is designed for desktop viewing. Please note that you might experience some display or interaction issues, as certain features and interactions have not been fully optimized for mobile devices, yet.
