Spreadsheet.com is a cloud-based work management platform designed to help users create and collaborate on spreadsheets, project management solutions, and no-code apps online. With Spreadsheet.com, users can enjoy the familiar ease of a traditional spreadsheet while gaining the power of a database and the productivity of a project management system. Its advanced features, such as automations, integrations, and real-time updates, allow users to streamline their workflow and improve team productivity.
My Role:
UX Researcher
Duration:
1 Year 6 Months
Role Type:
Website Design
As the UX Researcher of our team, my major role involved researching, designing, testing, and presenting designs for multiple different features. I worked in collaboration with our head developer to present unique UX takeaways and design suggestions. Throughout the year and a half, I researched designs for Onboarding, Dashboard, Version 2 of Forms, and CRM. Afterwards, I presented takeaways and action items to the development lead as basis for future feature designs. The following is a walkthrough of the design process I went through for redesigning Onboarding within our product.
Create a Learning Center with video guidance. The beginnings of the Learning Center was implemented as part of the Onboarding update, encouraging and introducing methods to seek help or learn more about the product.
Give users the option to choose how much guidance they want. This option will help customize the onboarding experience depending on the user’s preference and circumstance.
Provide in-product guidance, such as info icons, dialogue boxes that appear when using a feature for the first time, and suggestion usage examples.
Highlight features that draw in our customer base and introduce them within the onboarding. Two main features introduced within the updated onboarding were automations and column data type change. When introduced, user testing showed a higher level of interest in the product.
During my time at Spreadsheet.com, I created over a hundred different templates for multiple different industries and use cases. These templates help ease adaptation and grew organic traffic and leads by 5 times from 20k visitor per month to 100k.
Designing each template requires a significant amount of research. Firstly, it's crucial to understand the current use cases, identify what's essential for each industry, and pinpoint areas where resources are lacking. After this initial research, we incorporate our understanding into a specialized template on Spreadsheet.com, which includes our unique features.
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For categories such as Construction and Real Estate, I collaborate with experts from these fields to co-design templates that are desired and valued. These collaborations enable us to evaluate and improve the templates we design through multiple iterations, ensuring that they are relevant and useful for our users.
When designing templates, we consider both current trends and popular news topics. For instance, during the rise of the OpenAI hype, we launched a category for OpenAI templates, leveraging the trend to reach a broader audience. We also stay updated on popular discussions about templates on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Medium. This enables us to engage with the community by creating and sharing our own Spreadsheet.com versions of interesting and trending template creations.
I established a social presence in our remote working company. I am a person who values social interaction and creating a unified force at work. Unfortunately, due to the remote nature of my work and with more than half of our staff based in India, communication beyond Slack check-ins and weekly overviews was limited. There were no casual interactions that would be present like when in person, such as a chat in the breakroom or brainstorming face-to-face. Therefore, I decided to take action myself and partnered with one of my colleagues who was based in India to create the opportunity to foster a stronger sense of connection with my peers. In the end, we created a three-part system that was tied into our company’s routine to foster communication and interactions.
#social channel - 3 Interactive posts a week
The most successful social post was "Guess Who's this Kid?", where everyone submitted a childhood photo that was then posted anonymously. Everyone was encouraged to guess the owner of the photo by commenting on the post.
As the Slack channel developed, my next step was to organize group activities. Monthly Game Nights were introduced. As scheduling was a challenge, we had to hold the events early in the morning IST and late at night PST. Despite this, we managed to achieve a 30% attendance rate. The most popular game was "Gartic Phone," where everyone bonded over the struggle of drawing with a trackpad or mouse.
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Another successful activity was the introduction of Virtual Coffee meetings. By using the Donut Slack extension, co-workers were randomly matched for one-on-one meetings every two weeks to get to know each other in a more relaxed setting. A list of icebreakers was generated to facilitate conversations, and over time, our members developed comradery and familiarity with one another.
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