Case Study
We partnered with EMC to create a suite of web products called LEAP. The goal of LEAP was to bring their content management solutions into the 21st century. Moving away from monolithic on-premise solutions, LEAP's goal was to unpackage the functionality of document management into smaller chunks that would live on the web and position itself as a cheaper and faster solution to their customers.
Creating a Design System
One of the big challenges we faced was how we could keep or create consistency across different apps when each app has its own designer and product manager with very little day to day communications with other teams. We started weekly meetings to go over aligning design patterns and creating a design system that could be a single source of truth for both Design and Development.
A Closer Look at Concert
Concert is a document collaboration tool that introduces the concept of order and workflow to the collaboration process. It allows owners of a document to assign specific sections to other participants and track their progress and changes.
Understanding the User
Because we have two categories of users (document owners vs contributors), we had to support different ways of accessing content.
We used a filter as the primary way to sort and find content. A filter is flexible and intuitive, and while it doesn't provide a specific result like search does, it's a great way of organizing content to your preferences. We user tested the functionality of the filter as well as A/B tested different typefaces and visual treatments for the filter.
We use tabs to surface different types of content that may fit the user's workflow.
Problem: Editing a Document
The editor not only didn't allow for real time collaboration, but it also didn't allow the owner to edit a section without first assigning it to themself. Because all editing was tied to the concept of "assigned sections", it became a big hassle to make even small changes in the document.
I pushed strongly to give owners the capability of freely editing un-assigned sections. To accomplish this, we had to implement a workaround by only allowing one owner to edit the document at a time. Behind the scenes, we assigned the entire document to the owner so that they could freely make changes as if they were using a regular text editor.
Animations & Transitions
Animations & transitions played a big part in bringing Concert to life. It provided visual cues to the user and helped them understand how to interact with various UI elements.
Design Audit and Visual Direction
Many of the LEAP apps had already existed in some form, but we were brought in to work with their designers to audit the apps and make sure that both the UI and UX of the products were ready for commercial use.
Designing for different screen sizes
We started off with creating the web app and then moved on to designing the mobile-responsive version. We eventually came back around to re-design the native mobile apps as well.
