Building the 1st revenue generating product
Designer - 1, Developer - 6, Q.A - 1, Marketing & sales - 2, Product Manger - 1
Overview
At Springworks (our company), we moved to WFH from mid-March and then announced our remote-first policy on May 6th. We’ve been since optimizing our home offices and our Slack workspace for productivity and testing lots of team-building activities.
We encountered a lot of organizations in a similar space who were missing their physical office workspaces and office camaraderie.
Problem
We saw lots of traction with Quizzes, but they required fixing up a time slot, downloading a separate app and conducting the quiz over a Zoom call.
Frustration we tried avoiding:
Engagement for the future of Remote work shouldn’t be just about siloed private chat or mini group chats all day sharing cat GIFs, It can be something meaningful too.
Solution
That’s when we decided to build a Slack app.
Trivia quizzes are fun, easy to launch, and provide a quick 5-minute break to your workday. And they're real-time, meaning the team comes together to play! That's the point. MCQs - multiple choice questions with 4 answers each across topics like science, tech, business, movies, entertainment, and even Maths and Grammar.
Look out for the GoT, The Office and Harry Potter quizzes as well. Seamless - play with your team anytime, anywhere right on top of Slack Multiple game types (coming soon) - for variety Leaderboards (coming soon)- track results real-time along with final podium standings showcased at the end. 👍🏻
Design Approach
Goal:
Bring Social & Fun back to your workspace, especially remote workspaces with fragmented workforce across geographies
In a world moving fast and pushing out a “minimum viable product,” the first mile of a product’s user experience is always neglected. Since, the project had tight deadlines and lot of competition in the space - I had to decide clearly about the design approach.
🔗Presentation on MLP framework with Trivia
My responsibilities and Deliverables
- I was asked to own the design and User Experience process from end to end while partnering with Engineers, Product Owners, and Business stakeholders.
- Define the visual language of the app/micro-app
- Should be consistent across platforms (Slack, MS Teams, Google chat)
- Sync up with multiples teams for the experience apart from the dashboard where primary interaction and actions take place
- Initially I was involved in scoping out the features as a part of Product team.
- Slack commands + nudges (working with content team)
- Make prototypes for upcoming features with Sales team
- I also created a component library and set of design principles to allow the team to continue building out and prototyping features.
Design Process
Initially started with wireframes
Used a Figma plugin (Visual eyes) for UI screens
Working in a startup often entails designers dealing with a highly dynamic and rapid work environment. Given this fact I recently gave “VisualEyes”, a smart attention and clarity test plugin a chance. (read a really interesting case study using VisualEyes here)
My very first test with this plugin was simple: Which of the following navigation options drives more attention? here are some of the examples below.
Comparing multiple options like this, gave quick feedback to push tested visual designs with data points to get the MLP out.
Gathering insights and improving overall experience post launch - (Social listening, Sales team)
A lot of people were clicking on to see the top three winners on leaderboard - Found this through hotjar and we decided to show the top three after the quiz itself as podium without them having to move out along with their ranking.
Screens
Design challenges
- Tight deadlines - Since it was an experimental product and we had tight deadlines, I had to design the screens before the launch over a weekend.
- Varying game formats and quizzes -
- Action experience consistency in Slack and Trivia
- Designs for Multiple platforms
Learnings
- How we stood out
At a time when bots/micro apps it was critical for us to launch quick within a week's time and scale from there on. All teams had to come together from Design to Marketing for Product Launch. We leveraged the advantage of being one the first players to the maximum,
Applications were dull and boring, and workplace communication depended almost entirely on email, our aim was to make Trivia stand out from the crowd. Our guiding question—why not?
- Using data points/observation/Social listening are critical to apps success
- Build for scale & Plan for scale
You learn to plan for scale only when you’ve experienced enough failures. Scale ready designs aren’t a priority in a small setup and more so in a product that was being launched as an experiment.
When you’re designing a product like this you don’t expect that it would be this huge. It was sort of an experiment.
One such instance I would pick here is that of a dashboard. I went for the dashboard layout not because it was easy but because it was easier for developers and it was the backend of the product not the front-end. Since, the frontend of the product is happening in the parent app itself (Slack). For a backend heavy product like this, it was critical as a designer to prioritise the overall functioning of a product well rather then than some fancy UI. Great UI is always a bonus. rather than trying a single screen layout. It helped engineering setup right from day 1 to start delivering. A lot of the design decisions were made keeping in mind the scaling aspect of things.
We would have faced challenges if I just delivered what the product expected out of it. So, I think it was critical to make that decision of re-thinking through the wireframes that product gave and pushing for what was better in terms of handling scaling.
- Speed/performance > Good UI
How we removed the redundancy as a team and how it affected the overall speed. Speed trumps good UI
Impact
Trivia - Launching a product that was an instant hit
Result: All this in a span of one month
🥈No. 2 on slack App Store globally
🥈No. 2 on Product hunt on the day of launch
🎮 19,000+ Trivia Players
💻 500+ Workspaces played Trivia
🌍 30+ Countries
🤩 59 recurring paid customers
Update:
Trivia is now in the Top 10 in the category of "Productivity Bots" on the topmost Software Reviews platform - G2
Future
We held the first weekly challenge - where participants from different workspaces across slack get to compete on a single question and here were some stats.
Only 72 Trivia Players were able to solve the question and find an appropriate answer. And guess what, just 4 got it right!
Many more such exciting challenges & formats coming up!
In News - Other reads related to Trivia
Some other projects
👉🏼Trivia - Fun within workspaces for remote teams