Decreasing time to value for new and trial users by helping them get started with pre-built solutions
Smartsheet template gallery
Role: Feature lead
Timeline: 12 months
Key results: Currently in Beta!
SITUATION
Imagine it’s the year 2010 and you’re a marketing manager running the latest work management software on your Mac Mini Unibody.
Now imagine it’s 2022, and now you’re running a company on that same software where a crucial part of the UI remains largely unchanged... fun, right?
Though we have made a lot of strides, in the beginning of 2022 Smartsheet decided it was time to make a new team to re-look at our creation experiences. Meaning any user who wants to create an asset in Smartsheet, either starting with a template or on their own, is about to have a way easier time.
I asked to be on this team right when it started, excited to take on the challenge of defining and executing on a vision. I first decided we needed to define a “Northstar” together as a team, to get alignment and a direction we all believed in. I organized and facilitated a week long design sprint with our engineering and business stakeholders…
Screenshot of the old template gallery
TASK
In the problem framing portion of our workshop, we identified our key business and user opportunities. The business goal is to:
Increase trial conversions and active users
And the user opportunity is:
How Might We help users find and create valuable solutions that will keep them returning?
We also knew we might have some roadblocks to consider along the way. The beauty and challenge of our tool is we have a very diverse set of users. We knew we needed to design an experience that will scale across many business use cases without confusing users. And, create an experience to work for both simple assets (e.g. a single sheet) and complex ones (e.g. a set of assets)
And though our business need was to focus on new and trial users, we didn’t want to leave any of our dedicated power users behind. To make a flexible experience, we decided to tease apart the use cases and both:
Support create from scratch and importing options
Provide a dedicated place where users could browse, preview, and use new templates
With all this in mind, template gallery was born!
A zoomed-out screenshot of my workshop Miro
ACTION
I iterated and created designs and prototypes ranging from low fidelity to high fidelity as we went through 4 rounds of user testing, moving from early concept testing to actual usability testing. Some of our top learnings that motivated design changes were:
Relatability is a key: Participants expect the ‘recommended’ content to be based on their profile (role, industry)
Participants look for titles, social proof and images to select a template
Being able to preview the template quickly is very important
Based on our extensive testing, I handed off our final designs to the engineering team and supported them through implementation.
RESULT
We just launched to our Early Access Program in January 2023 and will be headed to GA in the next couple of months. I will share the live site here when it’s public, but here is a snapshot of some of the user feedback we’ve received so far:
“This new template gallery is a big improvement in layout & how filtering works to get you where you need to be. I would like to have the ability to mark favorites and be able to have a another filter that allows you to see only your favorites.”
“I loved the new template gallery. Before we need to download the template to really understand if it is useful for you. But now we can consult its features before. It’s really good!!”
“The new layout is good and the categories are easy to understand. I like the overview instructions and screenshots for each template, which allows a user to preview before committing to use.”