Templates are dope.

(because making something from nothing isn't easy)

There's this company,

Lucid Software.

One of their products is Lucidchart.

Its an online platform which facilitates complex diagramming.

(Think, spreadsheets on steroids, oh, and interactive!)

Below is their user dashboard.

This is where the problems begin.

But users can't tell. You might be tempted to click the +Document button.
Or, you click the drop arrow next to +Document.
Or, you press the banner with the box that says "More Templates"...
...the one that looks like a hand of playing cards.

So you click the orange "+Document" 

Surprise! A new page loads.

Your impulsive decision led to new lands.

For which you panic.

Where were the ready-made templates, again?

(Its under "Files," take my word for it.)

After considering some of your options, you choose this template to the right.

You feel stuck.

This feeling of ineptitude isn't your thing.

So you close out.

But you're a kind soul.

So you politely respond to an account closing questionaire. You know the ones.

And Lucid Software is a pretty rad company. So, they gave my team a bunch of convoluted, contradicting data from all the lovely people who closed out.

It was up to us to figure out what to make of it.

This could have been prevented.

After all...

Had you clicked the dropdown arrow, or the button that resembled the playing cards, you would have been directed to this lovely template picker.

But you didn't.

So this is our problem.

1) Users cannot access the template picker (that drop arrow you should have pressed). 

2) Nor can users find the templates which meets their needs.

Here's what we know.

Users (broadly) want one of these three starting points...
Inspiration

Some sort of template for reference. Something to provide structure for all their ideas and diagramming process.

Know What They Want

But have trouble visualizing it their content right at the start. These users need a template just as a starting out point.

No Templates, Please

These users are confident and capable. Any experience having to navigate through a template picker is a waste of their time.

So this is what we did about it.

Final Design





User Dashboard

Blank Documents and Templates have been separated by category via dedicated representation (buttons). It was my team's belief that this equal information hierarchy would elicit deliberate choice between a blank document launch and an intentional exploration of templates.



Template Picker

Since the picker reads left-to-right, priority is first given to the categories column, to orient the user to the family of diagrams they are exploring.

Intra-picker, we have given priority to explore an expanded preview pane, accompanied by a scrolling templates bar banner (beneath). We found this relationship between the navigation column, preview image, and scroll-banner to particularly map well to the topography of the conventional Apple, “Finder.” We predict that this particular similarity facilitates schematic integrity for the expectations of an immense population of users, namely Mac owners.



Template Picker-Thumbnail View

This thumbnail grid view occurs when the expand arrow is pressed on the top of the scrolling banner.

Once the user clicks a template, the thumbnail view will collapse back into the previous scroll banner. The selected template will be in the preview pane.

We intentionally incorporated Lucid's contemporary thumbnail view so as to appeal to the current users. (We did not have data from users who were satisfied with the contemporary version, anddid not wish to alienate those users.)






Full Template Editor

We placed the template picker button directly on the navigation bar (top left). Further, we decided to align it next to the “help” button, since our users identified this as a place where they would look for reference templates.

Additionally, the template picker button can also be located by searching within the  feature finder.

Digital mockups rendered by Seren He. Rationale written by me.

Initial Sketches & Teamwork

Thank you, to my wonderful team.

TaCora Burton

Seren He

Marshal Robbins

Copyright Collin Pfender. All Rights Reserved