Overview
BACKGROUND
I worked as a designer on Toodledo, a productivity management application that currently has 50,000 users. They wanted to introduce a collaboration feature that would grow their user base. Toodledo has primarily been a B2C, but wants to expand into B2B.
ROLE
Product Designer, Research Lead
CHALLENGE
Adding new users without losing/negatively affecting the experience of current users.
FINAL SCREENS
Because Toodledo was venturing into new territory by dramatically changing and expanding their collaboration feature, we conducted a competitive analysis of 9 companies that did the feature well. These included Asana, Airtable, and BaseCamp.
“Ton of stuff everywhere - lots of clutter - what am I looking at?”
— Dan, new user
Research was done on both new and existing users. As research lead, I conducted user interviews and usability testing on people who had never used the website before in order to learn more about how newcomers to Toodledo currently experience the onboarding process for collaboration.
Questions and tasks in the usability testing were formulated based on our teams initial experiences with Toodledo as new users ourselves.
After collecting information from users, we grouped similar pain points together and then organized them into an affinity map. We decided to focus on maximizing positive effect for new users while minimizing change and disruption for existing users.
Through user interviews and usability testing, we discovered that the 3 primary pain points for users new and old were: (1) confusion over tracking tasks, (2) difficulty setting up the collaboration feature, and (3) a clunky way of removing existing collaborators.
In order to effectively tackle the many facets of Toodledo, our group of 8 divided into sub-teams. I was responsible for “adding a collaborator while creating a new task”.
“When you add a task, immediately you want to add the people you are sharing the task with”
— Chunxiao, new user
Listening to Users
User testing revealed that new users wanted to be able to add collaborators as they were creating the task. They were often confused by the fact that they could not do this. Prior to the redesign, they would (1) create the task, (2) wait for it to appear on their task list, and then (3) click into it and (4) change the assignment manually. The redesign allowed them to add collaborators instantly.
Because every screen in Toodledo was dependent on another screen, I suggested a cognitive walkthrough in order to better imagine what a user might experience as they are going through a task. This process allowed us to better manage multiple screens and avoid the pitfalls that could come from failing to see how they work together.
