We already knew that board adoption was low. Through past customer conversations and research, there were three main reasons for why users are not using boards.

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1. Users don’t know what boards are and have never used them

2. Users experience friction when creating and managing boards

3. Users don’t think boards create enough obvious value

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My job was to design a solution that would help tackle some of these reasons.

As someone who was not too familiar with Boards myself, I performed an audit of the current steps done by a user as they create a board. Sarah and I went through a rough blueprint of steps and observed pain points along the way, as well as opportunities to improve the friction. 

To narrow down the focus, we decided on two interesting options to tackle some of the reasons why board adoption was low.

1. Allow an admin to set default board(s) for an organization and specific groups, which addresses the problem of users not knowing what boards were

2. Adding content descriptions in boards, to address the problem of users not believing boards create obvious value

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We first picked allowing an admin to set default boards(s) as this was a good thought-provoking exercise to increase board awareness. One idea we had in mind involved building out a UI to control how an admin would construct a menu of boards for different groups. We began sketching.

We eventually hit a block, as it became clear to us that creating a dynamic side menu for different groups based on our current permissioning system would require massive technical changes, which wasn’t feasible for our project. 

With this realization, we shifted our focus to our other idea - a high impact, low effort initiative to add short descriptions to board thumbnails to help provide end users more context and generate increased value in boards.

We explored multiple design patterns for displaying and editing descriptions. The top questions we asked ourselves were: 

1. Should it always display or display on hover?
2. How can we perform this in a way that isn’t too distracting?
3. What’s a solution that will work for when there isn't a description?
4. How might one edit these descriptions?
5. What if customers want to add longer descriptions?

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The biggest hurdle to this design was our ambiguity with the general length of user descriptions. However, we surveyed internal Looker users to identify the length of context and found that the descriptions tend to be short, averaging approximately 200 characters (including spaces).

After quite a few iterations, we narrowed down to two top solutions, taking into account the technical constraints of the product.  

Our ideal solution is one where upon hovering over the tile, a description appears for the end user. We like this design because it removed unnecessary distractions from descriptions that could be too noisy for the end user. We also wanted to break away from the tooltip element since the product heavily utilizes this form of display.

Recognizing that this new workflow could potentially pose a more technical problem, we created another design that took into considerations the current pattern for board descriptions and applied that similar model for each board thumbnail instead. Admittedly, this is less exciting but functional and serves the design purpose.

We met with an engineer to discuss the technical limitations of a hovering description state, and to our delight, we learned that this design was very doable! After finalizing this solution, we prototyped the interaction to show a more refined design on how the elements would move and presented this for Hack Week Nov 2020.