Outcome
Improved the sharing and collaboration experience for larger teams on Venngage by introducing :
- Groups - so that teams can organize themselves in a way that reflects their organization and workflows.
- Group sharing - so that members are not left with a binary choice of sharing their work with everyone or not sharing anything at all.
- Multiple org admins - so that there is a flexibility of administration, removing the bottleneck of having only one person in charge.
- Central organization hub - so that it is easy to view and manage groups, members and the organizations "seats".
Case Study
Context
Venngage is a simple yet powerful design platform for infographics, diagrams, reports, presentations, and more. Primarily a B2B SaaS tool, Venngage targets business professionals without a design background to create stunning visuals to aid their communications. The tool offers over 8,000 customizable templates with a simple WYSIWYG drag and drop editor.
This project focused on addressing pain points for larger teams on Venngage when sharing and collaborating on designs.
The Problem
From our internal usage, user feedback, and competitive analysis, We landed on these problems :
- Enterprises can have multiple teams in an organization that work on different projects.
- Enterprises require a central place to manage/provision/pay for all of their “seats”.
- These teams may or may not collaborate together. They want flexibility.
- With a large number of users, managing users, their space, and settings requires multiple levels and flexibility of administration. One Team Admin creates a bottleneck.
- These users have nuanced sharing needs. They may want to :
- Share a design with someone to edit a design while only giving someone else viewing access.
- Share a design with everyone on their team.
- Invite an external party to work with them on a project for a limited time.
- Invite an external party to view something they're working on.
Team Organization
Teams on Venngage have an average of 18 users. In one case, as high as 45 users. These users are creating a variety of designs relating to multiple projects and multiple departments.
The way that Venngage Teams is built, makes it difficult for many users to collaborate across teams and departments.
Users are in one big group where everything and everyone is mixed together.
This can be okay for smaller teams with a handful of members, however difficult for larger teams.
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This image shows how our internal team worked around this first problem. We created folders to organize designs in this shared space. However, this way or organizing departments and documents did not not scale effectively and it did not address the following problems.
Sharing
Users are left with a binary choice when sharing their work. Share your design with the entire team or don't share at all.
In order to collaborate, users on larger teams have the option to share their work with the entire team (which also meant giving all members editing access).
Admin
The 1 team admin, created a bottleneck.
Only one user on the team could be an admin, usually the person setting up the Venngage account. They would be the sole person responsible for adding + removing users, upgrading + downgrading users, managing the brand kit and managing billing.
With a large number of users, teams required flexibility of administration. Usually the person creating the account (i.e Admin) was not the user actively using our tool.
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Discovery
User Research
I spoke to a mix of team owners and active team members (in larger teams). Team owners helped us understand the team management side of things. Team members helped us understand the day-to-day of sharing/collaborating on designs.
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Main Takeaways :
- The word "Team" for different groupings of users may not be flexible or encompassing enough. Users’ needs are very contextual and we should have a flexible word that doesn’t force a particular mental model on them. After a quick internal survey, we decided to change the word Team to Group instead.
- Having group level permissions - assigning a person to a group with set permissions: edit or view.
- View only permissions are commonly used by “reviewers” or senior leadership that don't require any editing but are interested in viewing what the team is creating.
- There doesn’t seem to be a need for group level assets or brand kits. Branding seems to be consistent across all groups.
Ideation
Sharing Flows
Roles & Permissions
the existing permissions are tied to the 2 existing roles :
- Members (paid) → edit & view/comment
- Guests (free) → view/comment
This doesn't allow for the nuanced sharing needs of Enterprise users.
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HMW Share a design with someone to edit a design while only giving someone else viewing access
To solve for this, we will decouple roles from the permissions.
When a user shares a design they have to indicate :
- Who they’re sharing it with → can be an existing user in the workspace or someone new they invite.
- What that user can do → edit or view/comment.
This gives users granular control over how they share their work and how they collaborate with others.
In practice, this means that if a user shares a design with a Member it does not mean that they will get editing permissions by default. The design owner has to decide.
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Sharing & collaboration vision
Prioritizing & Scoping
Prioritizing pain points & defining scope
We broke down the project into 3 slices :
- Slice 1 → Allowing users to create groups and organize members into groups + Group sharing
- Slice 2 → Expanded user roles & permissions, Ability to have >1 org admin, as well as more flexibility for members.
- Slice 3 → Granular sharing
Testing
We ran internal testing sessions which helped bring up some unknown bugs and also improvements to consider.
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Prototypes for testing interactions
Final Solution
Workspace structure overview
Venngage workspaces will consist of 3 hierarchies.
Organization → an org can consist of a # of groups to suit any unique Org chart.
- Groups → a user can belong to a # of groups (this is what we were calling teams before)
- Users → Can be either a Member or a Guest. Members get full org access. Guests can only access the groups that they've been invited to.
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Vision for the Members page. (Note : design was simplified for our first slice)
Organization Page
A place to have visibility and manage all groups and members.
Organization - all groups & members
Groups
Groups allow for smaller organization of team members.
- Public groups can be accessed by all admins and members.
- Private groups can be accessed by all admins or by members that are in the group. Otherwise, users will need to request to join the group.
- Left panel groups is where you can easily access groups that you are a part of.
Accessing your groups via the left panel
Creating Groups
Group creators will automatically be added into the group as the group admin.
Therefore they (alongside admins) have access to rename, change the group type and delete the group.
Members can create public or private groups.
Group Sharing
Sharing designs with groups you are in.
Group Invites
Adding existing org members to a group.
User Flows
Admin
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Member / Guest
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Where do designs live?
There are 3 areas:
- My Design → these are private by default. Ideal for drafts, individual work, WIP, etc...Any design you create from the Templates page will start/live here.
- Group Designs → designs that are shared with everyone on a given group.
- Shared with me → designs that have been shared with you specifically.
(Individual sharing scoped out of our first slice)
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Release & Next Steps
I worked closely with our CS team to create help articles and walkthrough videos :
Consider opportunities to introduce certain aspects of workspaces to other plan types - to increase discoverability and potentially upsell users to the enterprise tier.
These are potential next scopes that can be prioritized based on more feedback and testing :
- Separating Role =/ Permissions
- Granular Sharing
- Allow users to share a design with a specific person in the org (org wide will require a redesign of collaboration)
- Collaboration with people outside of the main organization
- Allow users to manage MFA in Venngage (using FusionAuth API)
- Allow users to share outside of their org (public link)
- Allow org admins to force users to enable MFA
- Allow org to set whether users can disable MFA
- SSO / SAML / SCIM / Domain capture
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