Rockhopper
Streamlining Collaboration On Spreadsheets
Background
At the start of my UX journey, I joined Rockhopper, a startup aiming to fix how financial teams collaborate on messy spreadsheets and endless email threads. Our mission: design a streamlined annotation tool to make teamwork smoother and more efficient.
My Role
Product Design - user research, visual design, interaction design
Team
Archana P.
Rebecca L.
My Role
User Research, Product Design
Tools
Product Design - user research, visual design, interaction design
The Problem
Behind the Bottleneck
To understand the problem, we interviewed financial professionals who frequently collaborate across teams.
The current process relies on scattered emails and calls which makes it hard to stay aligned when working on shared documents. From this, we uncovered key problems and discovered opportunities to improve the workflow.
01
Miscommunication
Struggles to reach alignment across teams which often leads to call escalation.
02
Incoordination
Lack of centralized information create bottlenecks, as team members waste time searching.
03
Errors
Struggles to avoid and fix errors due to unclear changes and uncertain or outdated data.
The Users
Understanding the Flow Between
After finding analyzing the current workflow we discovered that there are two main user roles in the workflow: senders, who share the document and assign specific tasks, and receivers, who complete the assigned sections within the document.
We created two user personas and journey maps to represent the needs and frustration when collaborating on spreadsheets to focus our design efforts for these users.
Grant (Sender)
Grant, a financial professional at a SaaS company, needs to share a budget spreadsheet with other departments to ensure accurate and efficient cost projections.
Core Needs:
Efficiently communicate with teams to ensure the file is being properly understood, used, and updated correctly.
Frustations
Dislikes long meetings going over spreadsheet
Unknown errors and changes
Remy (Receiver)
Remy part of the marketing, received a document to input data but feels overwhelmed by the financial jargon and unclear instructions, fearing she might make mistakes.
Core Needs:
Needs to understand and know where to input the data
A way input the data accurately and efficiently
Frustations
Confusion on the spreadsheet
Difficulty understanding financial jargon
Design Goals
How Can We Improve The Workflow?
As we identified the areas of the work flow, we noticed the biggest bottleneck happened when users tried to collaborate on specific parts of the spreadsheets. Communication broke down, tasks became unclear, and progress slowed. We saw this as an opportunity to design a solution that would make teamwork feel effortless.
We anchored our approach around a core principle: streamlining offline collaboration. From that principle, we shaped our design goals to guide us.
CORE DESIGN PRINCIPLE
Offline Collaboration
DESIGN GOALS
Facilitate Communication
Help teams identify the right cells and documents for data entry to prevent confusion and escalation.
Foster Alignment
Centralize information to reduce search time and ensure everyone works from the same source.
Maintain Document
Provide clear visibility for changes and inputs, so users can identify and fix issues without confusion and backtacking
Exploratory
Iterating the Workflow
With these design goals in mind we explored different solutions to help financial professionals collaborate effectively and efficiently. We explored the idea of a collaboration side bar that allows the users to work on the document while also using it to collaborate with their team members.
Some early design sketches helped us visualize what this solution might look like while working on a spreadsheet.
Right Hand Collaboration Side Bar
We then turned our design goals into different features of how the collaboration side bar can be used.
Facilitate Communication
Tasking feature
Allow users to assign tasks to team members.
Foster Alignment
Notes & Insights
Users can write notes and insights on specific cells/data
Maintain Document
Version History
User can see an audit log allowing them to see changes in the document
FACILITATE OFFLINE COLLABORATION
Aligning Teams Through Tasking Feature
Identifying Cells
The sender can assign tasks by highlighting specific cells in the document, which triggers a button to create a task. This allows users to specify which cells they want the data to be inputted.
Inputting Details
After, creating the task the sender will input the details in the task to effectively communicate to the receiver of the tasks.
FOSTER ALIGNMENT
NOTES & INSIGHTS
Completing A task
The receiver can locate the task that was assign to them on the right collaboration side bar where they can see who assigned it to them with the Insights & Description to ensure an understanding.
Completing A task
When the receiver opens the task, they can easily see which part of the document requires their input. This helps ensure alignment across the team.
MAINTAIN DOCUMENT
VERSION HISTORY
Track Changes
Users can track updates directly from the tasks assigned. By clicking on an element, the interface highlights which cells were modified, ensuring clarity for the users and a cleaner document.
