The goal of this sprint was much the same as the previous: design a product for sharing your work with collaborators. This time, I tried substituting the work of api integrations (e.g. GitHub) with manual updates by users themselves. If people desperately needed a way to view all their team’s work in one place, would they be willing to manually report when they had edited docs or pushed code?
For this sprint I decided to validate the hypothesis with the Figma prototype itself. I created the initial (paper) sketches, wireframes and 80% of the figma mockup and was completely responsible for user-testing. I tried to use the onboarding flow to ease users into the understanding the full UI, by presenting a vastly simplified step-by-step walkthrough of sharing updates with a teammate. I then expose the entire UI with the corresponding parts of the ‘compose’ window filled in, so that users can easily see map the questions they answered in onboarding onto the full-fledged UI.
I found that, no, people do not need something like this badly enough to go through the effort of manual updates– unless their work is spread between like eight to ten apps with no integrations between any of them. Document-specific updates take place within their respective apps (i.e. GitHub or Google docs) and via Slack or a project-management tool. A single place to view all of your team’s work was not valuable enough to convince people to construct that place manually with yet another app.