Air - A new framework for organization and permissions

Company

Air is a platform where any creative team can discuss, approve, and share their visual content.

I led the design of a new feature called Libraries, which gave teams control over access to collections of visual content. By assigning permissions to individual users, teams could protect sensitive materials and ensure appropriate usage.

I quickly identified gaps in communication and proactively led cross-functional conversations to reach team alignment. With a bolstered user research approach, we reduced the time to ship a large-scale project from 18 to 8 months with impressive results: 120% increase in average contract value, 143% increase in expansion to Enterprise and 26% increase in Net New ARR.

Timeline

8 months, Nov 2022 - Jun 2023

Role

Lead Product Designer
User Research, IXD, Visual Design, Prototyping, Testing, Implementation

Team

Brian Nana-Sinkam - PM
Chad Gatesman - Eng Lead
Tomasz Szura - Eng Lead
Madison Brown - Engineer
Andy Tran - Engineer

Problem

It's easy to keep workspaces organized and up to date when the creative team has 5 or less members. But once more teammates and teams gain access to the workspace, the structure and location of boards and assets are easily changed.

Teams found that their workspaces become disorganized because users move things around. Workspace organizers then become frustrated as they start to incur organizational debt. Uploading in-progress work to Air also posed a risk because members and guests could download and use unapproved assets.

Mise en place

We want to give users an updated organizational and permissions framework that allows them to keep their content organized and clear, regardless of the number of members or guests in the workspace.

Sidebar navigation updated with new design system styling and libraries

Create library

Users can create a library with different permission levels to tailor to their team's needs

  • Limited access types to libraries

  • Distinct workspace roles

  • Light customization during creation

Browse libraries

Workspace members can browse existing libraries of content

  • View public and private libraries

  • Library admins must review requests to join

  • Invite-only libraries are not visible to the rest of the workspace

Library home

Each library has a home page with at-a-glance information

  • Quickly members and review requests to join

  • View top-level boards

  • Designated space for an overview of the library's content

View library details

Manage details and properties of the library from a single panel

  • Edit privacy settings

  • Invite multiple members

  • Transfer ownership of library to another member

  • Change default role of users who are invited

Manage members

Workspace owners have permissions to view library membership and details

  • View members in each library

  • Manage member roles in libraries

  • Give owners and admins more oversight and control

Release

We contacted a handful of customers to apply for access to beta as a way of testing interaction design, flows, and user experience. This program allowed us to iterate through a few versions of Libraries before launching a general release.

Our major takeaways from research was that users were more likely to use Libraries when they had multiple teams using their workspace, fitting the following profiles:

  • an umbrella company with many brands

  • a company with many in-house teams

  • or an agency with many clients.

This informed our decision to make Libraries an Enterprise feature, further bolstering our Enterprise offering for medium to large sized companies.

Impact

Libraries was the first large-scale feature at Air to take less than 1 year to conceptualize and deliver. A few months after Libraries was made available for Enterprise plans, there was a 120% increase in average contract value, 143% increase in expansion to Enterprise and 26% increase in Net New ARR.

Learnings

Visualizing permissions

There were many difficult questions being posed around access and permissions throughout this project where visualizations helped move the pod forward and inspire other members to create artifacts. Using diagrams were really important in a remote first company to communicate and simplify concepts of privacy.

Dependencies

The pod realized that building libraries would touch several other aspects of the product, including search, tags, custom fields, and workspace level permissions; I documented open questions around dependencies and designed mockups to outline potential solutions.

Shared dictionary

Creating a dictionary so that everyone has shared understanding of terms when speaking to each other was crucial, especially when introducing new concepts to the product. This artifact helped our pod as well as the entire company.