UX Study: Goodbye, Browse
For as long as we’ve been building Chipmunk, we’ve been building from scratch upon the foundation of a set of ideas and an obsession with improving the creative process. Doing this — building any product or business from scratch — requires a clear vision, driven team, and ability to course correct when you get too far from the line you’ve drawn on the map. But product optimization goes beyond fixing mistakes and calls for an examination of the actual building blocks of a product itself. It’s here that many product owners and stakeholders fail to see the forest for the trees and leave easy wins on the table, especially when it comes to UX improvements.
Eager to avoid these pitfalls, we regularly engage with our users and reflect on our own usage of Chipmunk to identify friction before it becomes problematic. Recently, we identified that the Browse tab within Chipmunk, a place likely familiar to any Chipmunk user, is a bottleneck for user activity. We asked ourselves why this was happening and were called back to Chipmunk’s earliest days and first iterations. Browse was intended to be a content hub, the place where teams would spend most of their time. Our vision was for Browse to function as a depot for creators on their way.
As features developed over time, specifically search and the feed that now appears on Chipmunk’s Home tab, Browse became less useful. We realized that individual assets were losing context outside of their collections and that browsing was actually antithetical to the workflow improvements we were hoping to implement. It was a barrier and ultimately, unnecessary.
Removing a core component of a product, one that’s been present since day one, can be painful. At the same time, clearing the field in favor of usability is invigorating, as has been the case with removing Browse. The challenge lies in ensuring that what fills the vacuum left behind is actually an improvement over what was taken away. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, so we’re very simply replacing the Browse tab with a direct link to collections, removing the barrier, providing context, and eliminating friction.
Better user experience leads to better process. Our goal has always been to make the creative process easier and better for all teams using Chipmunk. We believe incremental changes are key to massive productivity gains over time and we’re proud to share our own thought process with you here.
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