Carolyn Macaluso
White Label: Collections
The process started like most other projects, with introductory meetings, understanding the overarching goals, etc. I began ideating and came up with sample "recipes." These would be templates for users to populate based on the collection they were creating. As I worked with the team, we began to see by way of the wires that this would be more challenging and require us to step back a bit. We did this several times over the course of 3 years, never actually getting to any development. Fast forward, the concept has evolved. The end goal has remained but the path to it has been mired in ever-changing business requirements and engineering priorities.
Process, Experience & Outcome
The vision was grand and the lift all the more. Collections originally was to be a new way of opening up collaboration from within the Cloud app. Users would be able to create collections and invite other people to join the collection, add to it, and comment. Owners would have the ability to invite, uninvite, modify levels of contribution, and more. The goal was to leverage Cloud in such a way that it would increase subscribership and usage, without requiring subscribership to participate.
Introduction & Goal
Lead Designer: UX, UI
2020 - 2023
PWA, Android, iOS
New Feature
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The original designs described a few happy paths. I knew Collections would be an enhancement of albums so I started there. Before even addressing collaboration, I needed to know what and why people might collaborate. The first path was a simple, unformatted container in which users could add any type of file. More than just a photo album, but similar. Simple is often best, after all. Then I created two topical collection templates. These were almost like apps within an app.
I created a modal invoked when customers tapped to add a collection. They could opt for no template or choose from a carousel of premade ones. One example was for traveling and the other for collecting recipes. I threw myself into this and came out with designs that could practically stand alone as apps. The recipe collection template was way over the top but the travel template was much closer to the strike zone. Ideation is a great thing. While not everything gets used, you can come up with some nice gems to tuck away for another time.
The Evolution
The project got put on hold but continued to float about in the background. A new set of better-defined requirements meant a new set of designs. This time, the topical template concept was set aside and I went with a more generic concept that focused on collaboration, and quite a few new interactions that would enhance the user experience, such as color-coding collections that did not have hero images, or leveraging avatars to identify members of a collection. There were a few things that did not exist in the Cloud application that I proposed to make this a feature people would want to use regularly. A lackluster MVP was not going to get us the results needed to make it to phase two.
Pinning
As the designs evolved, I began to see new needs. We already had a way of favoriting items. The purpose of favoriting is simply a means of filtering. But with all the different ways users could use Collections, especially since they could contain any file type, the concept of pinning collections to the top of the main collections page was enticing. I created a series of prototypes and worked with our Researcher to discover user sentiment. The concept of pinning was well understood and even preferred over favoriting.
Reorganizing
One other concept that tested well was reorganizing individual items on a page. Isolated to a collection, this function would allow users to reorganize items on a page so they could prioritize content as they saw fit.