research

With the inception of our desktop Workspace home, we needed to understand how that might translate to our mobile application. We also wanted to better understand how our user’s use their mobile device for tracking, updating, communication, and finishing work.

First thing I did when beginning this project was to better understand the current usage of our mobile app and which features were most used. Historically our mobile usage has been low and as an enterprise SaaS, we have put more time and effort into our desktop product. I really wanted to change that, with the pandemic changing the landscape of remote work, I felt it was even more important to tailor our app to being easy-to-use and answering the needs of flexible work.

Pulling the analytics of the current mobile app showed us a few interesting things. User’s are typically pulled into our app by our notification system. User’s also spend most of their time in our Home work list section, where their tasks, new comments, and any other related work items are located. This tells me user’s are prompted by a notification to view a new work item, respond to a comment, or sorting through their work to find something specific (which tells me it may not be intuitive or easy to find work with this list).

Next, I pulled analytics of retention of user’s to see when they drop off, this would help to understand if a first-time login was captivating enough to bring them back. Overall, it wasn’t and there is a significant drop in usage starting the second day. Also, understanding active user’s compared to year’s past to see if the pandemic had impacted usage of the mobile app, which it has, significantly. Lastly, a basic understanding of breakdown of device type, iOS being two-thirds of our usage.

Once understanding better the current usage and the analytics of the current mobile experience, I set out to do some competitive analysis. There are several apps that serve user’s in daily tasks, work tracking, collaboration, etc. I turned to the google play store and the app store to read reviews of competitor apps to see what users’s enjoyed and disliked about their apps. I catalogued this information in a Notion page that included screenshots of the app, summaries of likes and dislikes, and app store ratings.

Following gathering data about our app and our competitors, I set out to speak with user’s of our competitor’s apps to better understand how they were using them, what they liked or disliked, and to better understand mobile usage for work.

Using our usability scorecard methodology, I tested with several user’s to baseline the current home experience in our app.

This testing uncovered several areas that needed improvement.
→ Sign in issues
→ Filtering is problematic
→ User’s don’t know what they’re looking at
→ Too unorganized to be clear what they need to do next

With an average score of 66%, the usability of the current experience is not meeting our user’s needs and is unusable. We strive to reach a score above 90%.

With enough information, I began working with our PM to start on a SLC (simple, lovable, complete) first version of mobile workspaces.

With the first phase of the mobile workspace completed, we will continue to track and understand how these new features perform with our audience and iterate from there. Next additions will be to add in commenting functionality, customizable workspaces, additional object types, and reporting functionality.