lucidspark share modal
Role: UX Researcher
Other Team Members: UX Designer, Product Manager
Process: Participatory Design - Affinity Diagramming
Goal: Discover friction and pain points related to the sharing process and map out the ideal sharing experience based on users’ mental models.
Learn more about how Lucid uses Lucid for UX Research on the Lucid Software blog, featuring this project and its related planning documents.
project background
This project was part of an extended effort to increase the virality of Lucidspark documents and increase the document sharing across the Lucid Suite. This was an important area of opportunity, as we had several reasons to improve the experience:
• Users found the share modal difficult and confusing to use.
• Critical Enterprise customers were comparing the options to competitor options and requesting similar functionality.
• Several teams were responsible for adding additional features and the lack of coordination was cluttering the design.
• The design was not scalable, required significant lift from Engineering and was inconsistent across Lucidspark, Lucidchart and the Lucid Suite as a whole.
While this exploration focused on Lucidspark sharing specifically, the resulting solutions were applied across all products.
Right before I was brought onto this project, the team had released a new design iteration of the Lucidspark share modal. Gathering qualitative information about how that new design was performing was a top priority, however our initial planning discussion revealed unanswered questions about user expectations around sharing. The Designer and Product Manager responsible had specific questions about the information architecture and how it might compare to users’ mental models. Rather than sticking with the intended conversational interview structure, I proposed a participatory design exercise where we would ask users to design their own panels. Since this was a new methodology for my partners here, I took the lead in planning, scripting, and moderating these sessions. This was a learning opportunity for us all, so I made sure to bring everyone along every step of the way.
study planning and structure
In order to capture feedback on the share modal, we recruited active Enterprise Lucidchart users who have shared a document within the past month:
P1: Solutions Architect
P2: Product Marketing Manager
P3: Strategy Manager
P4: Sales Operation Manager
P5: Non-profit Consultant
P6: Enterprise Architect
I divided these interviews into main four parts:
• An introduction where we would discuss general expectations for sharing, how participants typically invite collaborators into their documents and their recent experiences.
• An overview of the steps users would expect to take when sharing documents. We created a list of sharing methods and permissions that we reviewed with participants, asking them to choose the options most relevant to their work or add their own.
• A participatory design exercise where they would design the ideal sharing experience using design components of the share modal.
While the final designs created by each of the participants were different, the rationale behind their choices were key insights into what makes an efficient sharing experience.
In fact, one of our participants had no interest in using the share modal altogether. The conversation took an unexpected turn at the very beginning, when she claimed that she had never even seen that part of the product. For her, the most straightforward method to share was to just copy the link from the browser bar. Rather than going through the entire exercise when it didn't seem relevant, I made the split decision to pivot. After checking in with the Product Manager taking notes, we followed the participants lead into a refreshing conversation about sharing in general. The end result was a high-level diagram of what several different sharing methods might look like based on her experience with comparative tools.
key takeaways
After our interviews, I worked with the project team to synthesize each interview and personally annotated each participant's share modal design. Comparing their expectations for sharing with the current experience, three main takeaways were used to guide work on the share modal moving forward:
• While the majority of the feedback we received around the current share experience was positive, most of the participants had difficulty accessing shareable links for their documents.
• Document sharing was typically limited to internal team members that would be expected to make changes to documents. External shares should be limited to view only access.
• As the most commonly used options, link and email sharing methods were commonly linked together at the top level at the modal. Most participants did not include additional advanced settings or security, highlighting the trust between internal team members.
next steps and impact
We left this project with a list of potential improvements to the share modal, but the highest priority was given to reducing the number of clicks needed to copy a share link. This ultimately led to the addition of a one-click copy button next to the “Share” button in both Lucidspark and Lucidchart. While it was a small change, eliminating that unnecessary friction immediately caused a 30% lift in document shares between users.
