Focal Automations —
Design Process
To provide insight into how I solve problems and approach design as a discipline, I have documented the process of designing Focal Automations, a feature that saves time by automating repetitive actions.
TLDR; We talked with our customers and identified unmet needs related to creative workflows. We then worked iteratively to address these needs, resulting in a modular automation approach that can be expanded in the future.
About Focal
Focal was founded to address problems in marketing collaboration, where creative briefs, assets, and iterations were stored across multiple tools such as Notion, Google Drive, Slack, other instant messaging apps, and email. This often resulted in chaos and lost content.
Discovering the need
Originally designed as a digital asset management solution, Focal gained traction by refocusing on facilitating collaboration between stakeholders, managing the creative pipeline from end to end.
Consequently, this shift meant placing more emphasis on workflows, where teams used Focal to track tasks and facilitate feedback rounds. These workflows often involved numerous repetitive tasks, ranging from copy-pasting content to assigning designers and notifying stakeholders at various stages.
Although our team had already developed Slack notifications and asset transfer to folders to address unmet needs, we began receiving a growing number of requests for granular, workflow-specific features. It became apparent that we needed a better solution to enhance the long-term user experience and prevent cluttering of the user interface.
Framing the challenge
Competitor research and benchmarking of prosumer software revealed that we were not alone in considering automations. While many task management solutions designed for team collaboration had built-in automation functionality, others, like Notion and Dropbox, had developed similar features and eventually released them in beta in 2023.
Although benchmarking similar solutions from competitors might provide a direction for implementation, it was agreed that our goal was to create a solution that was simple to use and lightweight, with the potential for expansion if needed.
As a friendly critique of existing solutions, they often appeared over-engineered and presented a slight learning curve for a less technical audience like ours. We aimed to avoid this, since automations are a feature that a user might not continuously tweak but rather let work its magic in the background.
Prototyping a solution
Second iteration
After conducting a series of user interviews, we prioritized automation features and selected three main use cases, focusing on their business impact and technical feasibility. Additionally, I redesigned the user interface from two columns to one, better accommodating automations that require extensive configuration options.
Further insights from these interviews led us to categorize automations into two groups: task automations and folder automations. This decision was influenced by the app’s structure, which intuitively guides existing users to these functionalities.
Outcome
The outcome is a modular feature, simplifying the integration of new automations as demand emerges.
To achieve our goal of facilitating a quick start, we incorporated recommended and popular automations that can be enabled with just a few clicks. This approach is similar to a feature I had previously designed for pages, which significantly increased adoption rate.
From a business perspective, automations offer a strategic advantage. They enable the onboarding of clients into higher-tier plans by saving time and resources. These savings are more effectively utilized in tasks like briefing and concept design. This not only delivers direct value to Focal’s customers but also provides compelling points to communicate the software's benefits to potential buyers.