Creating a Better Chat Feature in Trello
Timeframe 9 days, Team Size: 3
Case Study
Quality conversations and resources are being lost outside of Trello. In order to increase engagement, Trello have proposed the commenting feature be improved to encourage further sharing and saving of conversations and resources. Our mission is to connect people and discussion in Trello.
Approach
In Trello it felt a little out of date for people to discuss and share decision making as there is commenting in Trello but this worked well for certain tasks so there needed a chat feature for more open dialogue. From the competitive analysis Slack and Hip Chat in particular stood out for us where dialogue and focused ‘discussions’ were made possible in a different way, to a private messaging or forum posts. These kind of apps were primary to the workflow of almost all the people we spoke with.
From our early research it became obvious the saving and retrieval of useful discussions or resources would be crucial functionality rather than a ‘useful addition’ or ‘feature’ — therefore it was important for us to include some ideas which might address this.
Our first approach was to send a user survey to get some quantitive data and also recruit some users for further 1:1 and contextual interview. We were able to interview seven users that were our typical users. We had the great opportunity to visit a team using Trello at the Ministry of Justice and observe how they use Trello.
They had a good mix of different users, those that used meta data tagging to collate and synthesise project progress and who have a good command of Trello’s standard functionality using it in conjunction with physical Kansan boards on the walls.
Teams would use Trello and other digital communications tools to openly share progress but physical boards on the walls is where discussion and task conversation really happen.
Where this is not possible (e.g. remote teams) open dialogue platforms and video chat in particular play an important role.
We began by defining who our users were and came to the conclusion that Sarah was our main persona to guide our design thinking around. She’s confident, knows Trello and Relies heavily on Trello to have many decisions and make decisions quickly, therefore her expectations around usefulness and efficiency will be crucial to the success of these new features.
Out from the experience mapping and persona prioritisation, we chose to focus on Creating new discussion, joining a discussion, finding useful discussions and resources and managing notifications as the top tasks. We analysed these tasks to complete the user goals and began mapping out our user flows.
After the User Flows we ran a design studio to generate ideas about how to incorporate the chat feature into Trello. My main task on this project was sketching the wireframes from the website as seen below. The sketches were built up to higher fidelity in Sketch and tested with several participants.
Result
Our findings weren’t what we expected because when the users saw a new menu for discussions they didn’t take it as a natural addition for Trello.
People still preferred to make conversations around cards outside of Trello and users felt that they would not want to start a conversation at the global level therefore we thought of new opportunities instead of the chat feature such as access to resources, personal management and enhancing team activities.