Favorite lists
Platform
Web & Chrome plugin
Date
Oct 2019 - Dec 2019
The problem
Guru's knowledge architecture encourages teams to organize their knowledge by broad theme (Collections) and nest related themes (Boards) underneath those bigger themes. But users often have need to organize knowledge in more personal and specific ways for quick consumption. The only way to do that was by Favoriting Cards. Yet sometimes users would have hundreds of favorited Cards with no way of organizing them. We added the ability to organize favorite Cards into personal lists to give users the freedom to curate cross-functional knowledge.
Most users don't have control over their team's knowledge hierarchy, so Favorite Lists allows them to create their own mini knowledge collections outside of the set Boards and Collections. Managers could make a list of cross-functional Cards that are useful during onboarding and send them to direct reports, sales reps can create lists of Cards to prepare for sales calls, and support reps can easily group troubleshooting information. There were countless org wide uses for this feature!
What I did
Initial Research and Discovery, Brainstorming and Sketching, High-Fidelity Wires, Prototyping and Usability Testing, Visual Design, Dev Handoff and Support
Initial research & discovery
The origin of this project was focused around the sales use case, and helping sales agents curate a list of Cards to work from before a customer meeting. This idea was originally presented as a whole new feature just for sales agents.
I performed a series of internal interviews with our Sales and Customer Experience teams to better understand their need for personalized lists of Cards. From this I realized that there already is an area for personalized lists of Cards, favorites. We didn’t need to make a whole new feature, but could expand upon a popular feature we already had!
“Sales reps need a way to save a collection of Cards and open it quickly during a meeting.”
“I have around 100 favorite Cards and it’s useless because I can’t organize them and can never find anything.”
“I used favorites a ton when I onboarded, but then sorta stopped.”
Customer feedback analysis
Guru uses a tool called Product Board to collect and analyze all the feedback that users send in to us. Luckily, a lot of our customers are very passionate about Guru and provide us with a lot of thoughtful feedback that could help inform product decisions.
I went through all the Product Board feedback around favorites or the need to curate a personal list of Cards. This was a great way to better understand our users’ main pain points with our favorites feature and identify how to improve their experience.
Competitive analysis
I also performed competitive analysis on various apps that included personalized list functionality. This included social media apps, ecommerce apps, streaming sites, and even browsers where one can bookmark pages. I gained a lot of inspiration from this exercise and learned industry standards around how most companies allow users to curate and save lists.
Sketching, wireframes, and feedback
I lead a whiteboard brainstorming sessions with my design team to collect early stage ideas. We documented all the possible places favorite lists could live and how it could work. I always like to collaborate with my teammates early on in the design process to get all ideas out on the table. This is a great time to not worry about engineering lift, but instead think outside the box and be creative.
This was a great exercise for exploring many ideas and getting feedback on the fly. From this I was able to create wireframes of the narrowed down ideas to present to my PM and engineering lead. We were then able to make final decisions around how we’d like to proceed, and which designs we’d like to test on users.
User survey
I created a light weight survey to send out to our customers through the tool Pendo. This was a simple yes or no survey with an optional short answer that hit all users that had over 20 favorites saved. We asked whether or not the ability to organize their favorites would be useful to them. This was a super easy, low effort way to quickly gauge if this feature was worth putting time and effort into. We did find that users would find this feature useful, and also got some great feedback through the short answer field. I was then able to reach out to some of the users who submitted short answers for usability testing.
The survey
The results
Prototyping and usability testing
I created a high fidelity click through prototype of the favorites list designs to usability test on 8 participants. I asked each participant to perform a series of the same tasks to uncover any usability issues or user confusion.
We got some great feedback on the designs and this testing allowed me to fix any issues before finalizing and handing off designs.
“It would be great if my mentor could have shared lists and then I could copy the list and then edit my own from there.”
“Favorites is a good term for this. It’s more relatable and differentiated from boards and collections.”
“I think a lot of people in our level of management would find this helpful.”
Final Designs and Handoff
After performing usability tests, I was able to make the final iteration of the design for handoff. The designs touched various areas of the app, from the Card to the chrome extension, to the main dashboard. I always include detailed functional specs within my handoff so that the engineers can have a clear sense of what they need to do without needing to read long functional documentation.
I have an extremely close relationship with my developers, where they feel comfortable coming to me when they have any design questions or feasibility issues. I’m happy to collaborate with them, hear their ideas, and work with them to find the best solutions. I meet with development frequently to assess their progress and make tweaks on the fly when necessary.
On the card
Chrome extension
Web dashboard
We set up tracking on favorites lists to assess its usage and understand how it was being implemented by teams. We found that it was an extremely popular feature, with thousands of lists being created and up to 50,000 favorite views a week. We used this information to plan out future iterations of this feature going forward.
