Co-authoring feature

Microsoft Word Logo with bidirectional arrows connecting to two people, set over a cloud background.

Software:

Information management platform.

Problem:

Allow users to collaborate on documents stored in a controlled document management system. The feature must be easy to use (facilitate business) and also respect existing permissions and controls (maintain integrity). All activity must be audited (governance).

Using simple drawings to explain the how we are moving from consecutive to simultaneous editing. Simple drawings create a non-threatening baseline to kick off conversations about functionality and technical capability.

My role:

I was the Product Owner and lead researcher on the project.

Background research:

  • Desktop competitor research – SharePoint / Teams and Google Docs document collaboration feature.
  • Analyse past customer suggestions for this feature
  • Workshops with customers and users

Insights:

  • While the feature was often cited as a barrier to adoption, few customers had actual experience with competitor products. They didn’t know what to expect, meaning we could explore this space with them.
  • Competitors followed similar experience models.

Ideation:

  • Early functional ideation
    • How will this work for the user?
    • What will be happening on the back-end?
    • What permissions come into play?
    • What signals need to be sent and statuses set at the database layer, file store layer and front end layer?
  • Created UI flow diagrams and state matrices and worked with UI designers for initial prototypes.
Videos produced from Figma wireframes were shown to stakeholders to
a) get feedback from users and
b) explain functionality to developers
  • Used the prototype to create action videos – these were shared with users for feedback.

Prototype iteration:

  • Refined prototypes – discovered additional use cases such as “I want to add an additional person without having to end and recreate the sharing instance”.

Delivery:

Once the initial feature was delivered, I was able to gain feedback from real-world users. Iteration was key to the delivery plan.

  • Iteration 1 – single-step process to check out and share a document with a fixed number of co-authors.
  • Iteration 2 – ability to modify the co-authors list during the sharing session
  • Iteration 3 – nominating delegates to manage the coauthoring session
I created a “drink our own champagne” pilot to actively gather feedback after the release of iteration 1

Iteration allowed us to focus on delivering a single chunk of value and do it well.