Amy Brumet
Reducing Context Switching towards a Team Hub Vision
Whimsical is an all-in-one whiteboarding tool that helps people visualize and communicate their ideas faster and beautifully.
I led the design and project delivery for encouraging people to collaborate, hold conversations and make decisions in Whimsical as the business moved towards a "Team Hub" vision.
Approach
We had already gotten signal from many users about the failure of the current notification experience:
Repeated context switching from email to Whimsical is fatiguing and tedious
Project leads and managers especially find it hard to track conversations in email and refer to them later
To kick-off the project I authored an initial pitch including customer insights, use cases and competitive research. Wireframes helped to highlight the different directions, with the tradeoffs and benefits. Initially, we developed an overlay panel that you could optionally pin into place allowing for both a quick-preview and a focused dedicated view for all types of users.
Outcomes
Through dogfooding and beta testing there were several insights that shaped the final design:
People liked the ability to pin the panel, but usually forgot about the functionality
Most people wanted to get caught up in a single focused session a day versus continuous previews throughout the day
The inbox became a first-class way to navigate to important conversations or decisions
With these insights, we changed the design to a dedicated inbox and incorporated a daily digest email that enabled users to start their day in the inbox, getting caught up quickly and efficiently.
There was an opportunity to create some whimsy and exemplify a feeling of calm. I created illustrations that were inspired from our new website branding and initiatives for creating calm and focus in the app.