Annie Au

MarkUp users upload design files that they want to collaborate on with their team. Each time a file is uploaded it becomes a MarkUp project. As customers began using the product more and more we began seeing and hearing about frustration organizing and locating projects in MarkUp.

Customers had too many projects, and no way to organize them.

I joined the MarkUp team as the only Designer, this project had already been started. However the product team had been focused on the infrastructure. I was able to bring a customer focused lens and guide this project to completion.

When I picked up this project, the team had not had time to do any initial research. So, I started by identifying our customer personas after speaking to our customers:

During these conversations, I learned that our vocal majority were our Agency users. Although we had gotten started on Workspaces, I quickly learned that Workspaces would only solve part of the problem. So I began to think about Workspaces as part of a longer term intiative to introduce robust project management capabilities.

I took the learnings from the research and began to breakdown the problem into 3 primary use cases:

    • Users wanted to be able to organize projects into groups or sections
    • Users wanted to be keep work for various clients/projects in separate areas
    • Users wanted to be limit access to groups of projects

Then I began competitive research to see how similar platforms were managing the settings, permissions and sharing experiences:

The product manager and I began to identify which of the stories would need design so that I could begin prioritizing the work:

Although we had started with Workspaces, I wasn't sure if that made sense as the first solution. I started to iterate through potential solutions including:

    • Folders
    • Tags
    • Favorites
    • Quick Access sections
    • Workspaces

Folders seemed to be the solution with the largest impact, however there were technical limitations that made Workspaces an pre-requisite of folders, so we continued to prioritize Workspaces.

Workspaces allow users to create independent spaces within their account for projects, clients, products, and other categories. I needed to build this in to the most of the existing flows, as well as a new settings flow for Workspaces. I started by mapping out the impact these changes would have on the information architecture:

I started by designing how Workspaces would need to fit in with the existing Project dashboard. I introduced a new side navigation bar that allowed users to quickly switch between their Workspaces. This bar was dynamic and would adjust in various situations such as if the user had the ability to create new workspaces, or was only part of a single Workspace.

Next I focused on the experience related to managing Workspaces. Knowing that this project was a precursor to Folders, I worked to ensure these changes would be reusable for that project as well.

I also needed to introduce the ability to move projects between Workspaces. MarkUp already had modals, so I built off of the exiting patterns to ensure an easy user adoption.

Workspaces was launched through our standard Early Access release program via a feature flag. Users were selected through analysis of our Daily Active Users or people who had expressed interest in the feature.

In addition to the core work introducing Workspaces, in this project I introduced a new layout for settings pages. All of these changes were the foundation for our future changes and were ultimately spread throughout the platform. Finally, I also used this project as an opportunity to start a formal Design System for the MarkUp product. After the success of the MU Design System, I led the other designers on extending the system to their products.

Since this was the first project I was working on at the company, there wasn't a formal design system. Designs actually used to be created as flat files which made it hard for the developers to build quickly. I used this as an opportunity to introduce better design practices.