Design a document-sharing service from 0 to 1
UX Design @ Teambition - 6 months
Contribution
UX design & product strategy
Product
Web-based document-sharing service
Status
Launched at thoughts.teambition.com
Overview
As the company expands its business, we created a document-sharing service Thoughts to help our customers to build their internal knowledge management system.
From the very beginning, I took on the role of the sole 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.
Why does it matter?
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
Collaborated across customer success, sales, and marketing teams to align the product design with business goals.
Tight deadline
Our product design and development cycle is notably brief, especially when compared to competitors with significantly larger teams.
Unforeseen tech restrictions
The team has no experience in document-sharing products, leading to a series of unforeseen technical constraints emerging before the design phase began.
The Problem
Before this project, our primary offering was Teambition, a cloud-based project management and collaboration platform. However, our document-sharing feature (Post) within Teambition was inadequate to meet our customers’ needs. Consequently, we decided to build a standalone app and targeted our existing customers at that stage to upsell our products and expand our business.
In its early stage, the new product targets a similar user group as Teambition: young professionals (aged 25-35) from small to medium-sized companies who collaborate on 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.
Evernote
Limited collaborative features.
Limited support for organizing document.
Office 365
Excessively priced for SMB business owners.
Not user-friendly for organizing documents.
Confluence
Steep learning curve.
Outdated UI (at that time).
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.
Final Design
While numerous design details were considered, I will highlight the pivotal ones that resonated most with our target customers.
Key Features
Edit
Content-aware
Formatting Toolbar
The available toolbar options changes dynamically based on the selection of the content, ensuring users always have the most handy option in front, and only shows up when users need it.
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.
Organize
Organize Documentations with
Nested-page Navigation
Nested-page navigation helps the users to organized the documentations and makes it easier for others to look up them.
Result
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.