Concept designs for collaborating within teams and sharing alert notifications
A collaboration feature matrix showing collaboration themes by persona across the complex survey user journey including survey creation, data collection and analysis
Collaboration features are unforgiving as far as user expectations for a simple, intuitive and seamless experience. At the time SurveyMonkey had very little collaboration features to speak of.
I had the opportunity to lead a research and design effort early on in the product scoping phase which established more of a collaboration model that informed key collaboration features for our future product roadmaps across the org. The matrix model was based on community attributes, personas archetypes, collaboration themes, and prioritization.
Role: Lead UX Designer for User Collaboration
Project: Collaboration + shared alerts
Company: SurveyMonkey
Context
The first phase of collaboration research resulted in a prioritized list of features based on customer requirements and feedback including granular permissions, commenting, bundled price packaging and sharing alert notifications.
I applied best practices in UX research and design by generating personas in conjunction with our research team through customer interviews.
I approached the notion of collaboration with much deeper empathy by building out more of a framework to explore community attributes such as identity, purpose, environment, boundaries, expression, and history across the full end to end survey user journey comprised of design, collect, analyze and report.
Framing a collaboration model with an affinity map
Collaboration as a human behavior is intricate and vast. As such my approach was to capture the current collaboration experience in addition to exploring future user scenarios and use cases.
I designed an affinity diagram as a navigable map to establish coordinates to identify steps in the survey experience by asking what collaborative behavior might be taking place at various points in the user journey.
The color coded tags represent internal and external evidence spanning both existing customer pain points and customer requests. The map shows a denser population around communication and boundaries in the earlier part of the journey when setting up and designing the survey. This provided an evidential narrative for product feature options such as commenting and permissions.
Mapping collaboration behavior and features across the survey user journey
Personas
I created these design personas from multiple customer interviews we conducted to gauge real world collaboration behavior and preferences.
Beth was mainly interested in a customizable shared survey results page
Cristina’s main area of concern was adding permissions and controlling privacy
I produced low fidelity artifacts and digital sketches done in fast iterations as that was most appropriate for the moment.
I created a series of quick flow charts to better understand how things would flow given the various agents and the permutations of different states and circumstances, uncovering edge cases in the process.
A deeper dive into shared result notifications by detailing user tasks and the relationships within this collaboration event.
I identified the entry point to this new collaboration feature allowing you to manage the sharing of your response alerts which was in proximity to and scaled an existing smaller feature that allowed a user to simply turn response alerts on or off.
Now you can invite people to receive their own response alerts, add a message, filter their view of the data results and also customize their notification frequency.
Show a group list of your team members to select who needs to receive alert notifications.
I coded up a quick bootstrap prototype which helped with the information experience. Our UX copy writer helped clear up a few points of confusion such as inviting someone to share alerts vs inviting someone to share the actual survey.
I progressed the design using another approach using a tab interface to distinguish between sharing alerts and managing your collaborator list.
Concept sketches for a typeahead search feature that would be very helpful to customers in large enterprise teams when sharing alerts.
A user can now select their recipient from the shorter filtered list.
Identify people to invite within the top tab design approach.
Early sketches for the concept of a top level, central location for all your notifications and alerts across the entire SurveyMonkey core platform and not just the Analyze response alert notifications.
I took a look at how other aspirational and comparable sites where facilitating collaboration like Google, Zeplin, Evernote, and InVision. Here is the Dropbox study for sharing an asset.
A desktop research study of collaboration within Dropbox