Datasite Product Design Team
Tools & Methods: Cross-function communication, Design workshop facilitation, Scalable design solutions, User research, Data collection & analysis, Design strategy, Wireframing, Prototyping, AI prompting, Figma, Dovetail, Pendo, Lovable, Replit, Pen & paper, Jira, Confluence
Overview
I joined the Datasite team as a senior product designer in February 2022. It was a busy three and a half years with the team, scaling the product with company growth, adding new features, and incorporating emerging technology in real time. Below is a case study of one of the most interesting projects I worked on in my time there.
Key Projects
Q&A Tool Redesign
At Datasite, I led a redesign of our core Q&A tool to tackle low adoption rates in the U.S. market and bridge differences in product usage between U.S. and EMEA regions. Below is a walkthrough video of the final designs and details about how we got there.
Problem
Despite being available globally, the Q&A tool saw minimal adoption in the U.S. Our goal: uncover why U.S.-based users weren’t engaging, and adapt the design to their needs while maintaining relevance for EMEA.
Research
Conducted hybrid qualitative research—including interviews and contextual usability sessions—with U.S. and EMEA customers. Identified differing workflows: U.S. faced looser regulations, allowing them to follow a more open-ended approach, often leveraging more disparate communication methods. EMEA had to follow stricter protocols, increasing the need for a more rigid process like our current Q&A facilitated.
Pain points included:
Tool is overly complex even for experienced users
Onboarding is difficult with a steep learning curve
Friction in back-and-forth communication
Current Dashboard data poorly integrated with tool
Missing highly-desired functionality like, “View As” and “Clean Team” support
We interviewed a large number of both external clients and internal SMEs to uncover these key insights. As a result we had a lot of data to sort through, which necessitated a new taxonomy structure in Dovetail. Below is a screenshot of that new taxonomy approach which was highly effective, allowing us to easily discover and cluster insights:
Design & Iteration
Ultimately it become clear that we were already providing most of the user needs for Q&A in our Trackers tool. Trackers is newer, has a cleaner codebase with less tech debt, better usability, and a large amount of users were already in Trackers and familiar with it’s functionality. This lead to the following design updates:
Simplified the tool to better align with user’s mental models for both our product and popular contemporary software standards.
Added simple in-line internal communication that gave users a sense of security and ease.
Better aligned dashboard data with user needs and connected that data directly to the sources in the Q&A Trackers.
Collaborated with development to leverage existing Trackers patterns for Q&A, reducing the need for net-new feature builds, saving time and money.
Quickly included support for “View As” and “Clean Team” features.
Results
Unfortunately I was let go in a massive round of layoffs at the company before this could be fully implemented. With that being said, our main goal was to increase U.S. adoption by 20%. I would have been tracking this metric in Pendo, monitoring feature usage in real time to see if our goal was being reached. Additionally, I would have kept a frequent communication loop open with our Customer Service team to get real time client feedback on the changes.
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