TL:DR
Sending of stickers, GIFs, emojis, or memes inside Teams were each treated as an individual flow, creating unnecessary complexity and making the experience of sharing something fun, extremely tedious.
The goal of this project was to bring together these content types into a single "unified fun picker" flow. I owned design for this feature and collaborate closely with my cross functional team to build and ship it over a month.
After shipping we saw a 2.8% increase in messages containing GIF's, Stickers & Emojis as well as a huge 10% bump in usage of stickers.
The Opportunity
Working on the TFL (Teams for Life) team meant we were optimizing the platform for everyday users, shifting away from the traditional work focused teams experience.
Sending "fun" content is a big part of that everyday usage and compared to platforms like Messenger & Discord we had fallen far behind.
This projects focus was to create a unified fun content area where users can share GIF's, Stickers & Emojis quickly and without opening multiple separate teams sub apps (the current experience).
Existing Solutions
Looking at competitors in the space I explored Discord, Twitter, Messenger & Slack's approaches to sharing fun content.
There weren't any huge surprises, these are all platforms my team and I have been using for years. It showed me in no uncertain terms that Teams was far behind everyone else in the space.
A couple of the biggest learnings I took away from looking at competitors were
- Each type of content is given it's own space, there's no combining Stickers & GIF's
- Most platforms offer a way to browse content without deep diving into that specific genre
Potential Directions
Early iterations focused on two different directions that I reviewed with my team. The potential approaches came down to side scrolling rows which allow more types of content at once or vertical scrolling grids of one type of content.
I conducted a UXR test with two of our partnered communities, these are groups of users who've signed up to test early stage designs and changes. From this test, there was no clear direction, it was split almost exactly 50/50.
Initially seeing content in the row format was a heavy favorite but when it came to selecting content to send the testers preferred the larger quantity of options in a grid layout.
