CASE STUDY
TEAM SPACES
Enables organisations to seamlessly segregate data among their teams, granting super users complete autonomy to self-manage this process.
The problem
Following an acquisition, the deprecation of legacy products, and the migration of users to Streem, there is a pressing need for feature parity to ensure the successful migration of user revenue.
PR firms and government agencies frequently manage multiple clients or divisions, where legal, security or compliance obligations mandate the separation of data access among users within the same organisation.
Streem currently lacks the capability of data segregation within an organisation. The introduction of this feature is crucial, considering these are high paying enterprise customers and will further increase the value proposition for larger clients looking for media monitoring software.
The context
Streem is a media intelligence platform allowing users (typically comms professionals) to set up keywords or queries of things they would like to monitor in the media. Streem scans behind the paywall across online, print, TV, radio and social media sources and provides an all in one place to view coverage matching their queries. Users are able to build reports and view insights of their coverage.
Project challenges
A major hurdle I faced at Streem was the company's focus on commercial interests, with success primarily measured by the number of features in the product rather than user value. The majority of the company’s roadmap was dedicated to achieving feature parity with legacy products to ensure the successful migration of user revenue. My focus extended beyond feature parity, aiming to enhance the user experience by modernising the extremely outdated legacy products, leveraging the opportunity presented by their complete rebuild.
As the first Product Designer at Streem after 7 years of being founded, I encountered resistance in advocating for UX improvements, challenging the perception that UX was merely a “nice to have'' amidst the company’s ambitions to dominate the media monitoring landscape. This presented a frustrating uphill battle, as multiple stakeholders held views conflicting with my product and design values.
This case study documents my journey balancing commercial interests and advocating for user centric processes, challenging stakeholder perspectives and ultimately championing the importance of user value in product development.
Narrowing the problem
Discovery and research
I would typically turn to user research to understand the needs of our users, however given the circumstances at Streem, my approach is heavily influenced by my personal empathy for users and my assumptions about their needs. While I have a clear understanding of the business requirements, I rely on indirect user research by talking with Account Managers who regularly support users.
I took the time to understand the existing product and strategise how we might seamlessly integrate the concept of data segregation, as well as conducting extensive research to gather examples of industry standards and patterns that would intuitively resonate with users.
Defining team spaces and reimagining the admin experience
Strategy and design
Identifying user personas, customer journey mapping and user goals proved instrumental in introducing team spaces to Streem and reimagining the admin experience. Given the unfamiliarity of these processes to the product team, it was particularly rewarding to facilitate and educate them on methodologies for emphasising with users.
Adopting holistic design thinking, iterating on concepts and collaborating closely with product leadership and engineering were essential in ensuring the success of this project. While half the challenge involved building from scratch, the other half focused on reimagining the UX. Given Streem's lack of a design system, it was rewarding to establish processes aimed at enhancing consistency across the product.
Through the implementation of innovative design solutions, we were able to introduce data segregation and upgrade the UX in ways that effectively achieve feature parity, enhancing the user experience while maintaining alignment between Streems business goals and my assumption of user needs.
The solution
At its core, Streem aims to provide team spaces for PR firms and government agencies, facilitating the segregation of data access among users within the same organisation to fulfill legal, security and compliance requirements.
By accomplishing this, Streem attains feature parity with a legacy product, ensuring a strong value proposition for users migrating to Streem.
This empowers users to seamlessly switch between their teams, resulting in a more organised and streamlined view of the product. Moreover, super users within organisations have the autonomy to fully self-manage this process, aligning with Streems expansion into new markets and the absence of account management support within the product offering.
Team switcher
Users can seamlessly switch between their teams, with the context of which team they are currently on in close proximity to their data.
For cases where users belong to multiple organisations and may have teams with similar names (eg. marketing), it’s essential to provide context regarding the current organisation.
The team picker remains hidden when there’s only one team or less. Once a team is selected, it persists until manually changed.
Team management
Super users will now find a new page in their organisation management section, dedicated to managing their organisations teams. This is the core of data segregation, allowing super users to designate which users and mention streams belong to each team. They also have the capability to create new teams and delete existing ones.
This feature seamlessly integrates into the existing organisation management area, ensuring a smooth transition for super users within their workflow.
Team spaces are offered as an add-on to the Streem product. Once an organisation has added team spaces, all users are required to be part of a team. Initially, users are automatically assigned to a first team, named after the organisation. However, they have the flexibility to update and add more teams as needed.
Usage upgrades
An important element of this project involved emphasising usage per team transparently. Organisations acquire SKUs for Mention Streams and Users, and they must upgrade when they reach their limits. These SKUs are sold per organisation, not per team. It’s essential for super users to easily discern if one team is consuming a disproportionate amount of resources. I expanded upon an existing usage page and also integrated contextual information into the relevant pages. This ensures clarity regarding the organisation's usage patterns.
UX improvements
While working on the existing grid component, I took the opportunity to implement UX enhancements aimed at improving readability and accessibility. Additionally, I integrated a team dropdown feature to enable filtering based on teams.
Organisation switcher
Building upon the team spaces project, enhancing the organisation switching experience was a valuable addition. Previously, users had to log out and then log back in to access their other organisation. Now, users can link their separate organisation to a single account, and seamlessly switch between them within the app, similar to the team switcher functionality.
