Sharing Content

Redesigning the look and flow of sharing content between different business units in an enterprise account.

User Stories • Permissions Modeling • Wireframes • Visual Design

Increased awareness of what was shared

There was a separate location for content that was shared with others and content that was private. Instead “shared” was turned into a piece of metadata that could be filtered by, and easily scannable in the list view of content.

Compiled complex permission decisions

The biggest difference in the new and old design was the increased visibility on what permissions were given to a piece of shared content. There were originally a lot of detailed permissions for each content type, that allowed people to get into not so ideal situations (like having permissions to send an email without viewing it). Also there were two layers of permissions that needed to be accounted for, the permissions of the user on their account and the permissions of the shared content itself.

Permissions were given batch titles to quickly choose from a dropdown, to eliminate time and confusion. These batches included view, view + edit, view + send, view + edit + send, and all. After talking to a few power customers who had concerns that they may have sharing needs that were not available in our preset batches, we added a custom permissions option which would allow the user to share with any permissions they liked.

Decreased time it took user to share content

Sharing become a top level action a user could take on a piece of content. Instead of taking a user to a separate location and having to share each piece of content separately, the redesign allows for users to share multiple pieces of content at the same time with various permissions to different business units all in one modal.

Removed scenarios where content was unintentionally shared

Originally when a content was shared, it was immediately shared to all business units with all permissions, until the user went back and revoked permissions. This caused for some legal concerns for customers who were creating emails for confidential products.

In the redesign, all content started as private, and then the user could add permissions and business units. It could be seen from the view of what business units have what permissions and what permissions were given to what business unit. This decision was made after customers saw both views as beneficial during user testing.

Roles

Julie Byers | Main Designer

Craig Birchler | Design, Content Team Lead

Jessica Krucina | Designer on content team. She took over project after I left the team

Stephanie Brechbuhl | Designer on content team, provided feedback and discussion

Spencer Abrams| Product Manager

Thomas Besluau | Developer Lead

Requirements

Users can share a piece of content with different business units under their enterprise. Users can assign various permissions to the business unit they shared with, controlling what actions it could perform on the piece of content (such as view, edit, send, etc).

Historical context & Problems to solve

The location for shared content and business owned content was different.

There were a lot of detailed permissions, and it was easy to accidentally give permissions that did not make sense - for example, allowing a business unit to send an shared email without having permission to view it.
A business unit could not differentiate the content that they shared and content that was private without going to a separate page to view the detailed information.
Once content was put into the shared folder location, it was shared with all permissions until the user went through and started restricting, causing legal concerns with very private information in a business.

Discussion

From the requirements and the discussions, I formed user stories using variations of the "content creator" persona, Alek. These user stories went through many quick iterations while cycling through questions with the product managers and the other designers. Topics of the discussions included, but were not limited to: legal concerns, is this setting the user up for failure, and will the user understand what they are doing and what affects their actions have on a piece of content. From there, the user stories were sorted into three main groups of sharing: not shared, shared to everyone in an enterprise, and shared with select business units. Also, we decided that all content would start off as private, and the user would add people to share. All changes to the share status would not take affect until the user was done assigning the share type, and selecting business units and permissions if applicable.

User Stories

Design

After the user stories had been discussed with the product managers, designers, and developers, I continued on to make a user interface design that best reflected the stories and goals. I knew going in to the design process, and after discussions with Craig, that I wanted to use some form of progressive disclosure, which only showed options that were needed if a certain share category was selected. Also, it was decided early on to have use a modal or a slide out pane for the sharing experience to keep sharing in the same place, and to not disrupt the user flow. The modal went through many sketch variations in order to best show the progressive disclosure, follow the design system in the Marketing Cloud, and provide the proper affordances for the user. We decided on an accordion style modal, with colored icons and radio buttons to show which share type was selected.

We added a share icon the the main content management data grid and thumbnails, so that the user could quickly see which content was shared. To view further details about a share, the user could bring up the modal quickly. If the user did not make any changes to the share, then the button would just be a "Done" button. However, if they did make changes it would change to a "Save" button. This allowed for the modal to both provide more details about the share and edits to be made in the same place.

For content shared with a business unit we created a specific view so that the content would be shown both in All Content and Shared with Me view. From there they can choose to move the content into a specific folder in their system.

Implementation

After some discussions with legal, and some other technical feasibility issues along the way, we narrowed down to two share categories: not shared and shared (previously the shared with select business units). Any changes to the sharing would change the button from OK to save so that the modal could be used as both a way to view a share, but also a way to make share changes, and make it apparent to the user they have made changes.

Folder Sharing

Once single content sharing was finished, I worked on seeing if a user could do something in a batch with a folder.

Some questions we had to address were:

How could you inherit certain permissions if each content type has different permissions.
How to let the sharer know that a folder was shared, and how would they see or edit those permissions - since the folder panel was much smaller with less metadata than the content system.
How would folders appear in the folder structure of the person a folder was shared with? Could they move it?

At this point, I switched teams and passed the project onto Jessica.