Context

I joined Beezy in Barcelona as Product Designer in November 2021, shortly after the company was acquired by Appspace. Beezy is an intranet or digital workplace that works on top of Microsoft Sharepoint, by adding a social layer which helps keep teams aligned. Appspace on the other hand is a product with many complex features for managing digital signage and space reservation inside a company's premises. The vision behind the acquisition was that of creating a synergy between the two products and offering one solution that would unify the digital and the physical workplace.

The following are some of the most relevant projects and features that I worked on at Appspace.

My time at Appspace has been really interesting because I got to see the transition from one company to another, I got to meet two teams and be part of the unification process. It was also challenging, because it felt like like chasing a moving target, and it was a time of big organisational changes.

Cosmos Design System

Born from the ashes of Nectar, Beezy's design system, Cosmos is the evergrowing baby of the design team at Appspace. The Barcelona team was better equipped to come up with a new design system, because of our tech stack and because we already had a POC of the approach to follow to keep design and development in sync.

During my time at Appspace, I've contributed to make the design system grow from 1 implemented component to now over 30 components, all of which are fully developed and available in Storybook. As the team grew from 3 designers to 10, it was also important to rethink the architecture of the file in a way that would be scalable, reproducible by other designers, and understandable by both designers and developers.

A major intranet feature: Blogs

Blogs for our modern Intranet was the first major feature that I've led. The feature was already present in Beezy, and we already validated the interest from our customers. Moreover, by looking at our competitors, Blogs was a strategic feature to differentiate ourselves.

Much of the work was also done looking at the future Appspace Employee App, which would reuse many of the components used for blogs. The aim was to reuse the "Blogs" template for Spaces of the Employee App, like Channels, Communities and Topics. We componentized the Space header, sidebar widgets and the side navigation, which replaced the horizontal navigation that was giving UX problems on Beezy.

Learnings

This feature came at a critical time for the product team. Following the acquisition of Beezy the team had to undergo a major restructure, and many of the higher-level managers were busy coming up with a new process that would facilitate the transition. There was also pressure from the US side to spend time and resources on the new Employee App rather than on Beezy, which was seen as an old product meant to be phased out. This caused the development to suffer numerous delays and downgrades. However, when the feature did come out, it received overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers when presented at different customer events.

Cosmos Toolkits

With our library of components growing rapidly, we started looking at different approaches to avoid having a bloated design system file. We liked the idea of having one central design system with just the most basic components and then subsystems or "toolkits" with specific components of different product areas. This allows us to only import components that we need depending on the feature we're working on.

Editor Toolkit

By aligning with the developers it became clear that the editor variants were getting a bit hard to manage. Blog posts, pages and comments all used different variants of the editor, and whenever we needed to start a new feature, we had no clear starting point. Both designers and developers were confused and maintenance was getting complicated. By that point, we had enough variants to start identifying two big groups: one was the editor for stories and pages, meant for authors, which included all of the complex formatting options, and allowed inserting media and files; the other one was a way simpler, streamlined version meant for most users writing comments and posts.

I was leading the effort to identify the editor variants. By co-operating tightly with the developers, I came up with a solution to make the editor variants consistent without compromising the design in each instance. Rather than creating just two variants, I decided to have two "functional" variants – Editor Full and Editor Lite. Because the Editor Lite instances were used in a wider range of use-cases, I specified the spacing for 3 size variants of the Editor Lite.

Templates Toolkit

We also started getting into the layouts and templates discussion, and eventually created a spin-off of Cosmos for page templates. Here I came up with a way to document how pages scale across the different breakpoints.

Link Tiles

This is a good example of how feature requests coming from customers can be deceiving. In May 2023, we decided to allocate some resources back to Beezy (now called Modern Intranet within the Appspace product offering), seeing as a good amount of revenue was still coming from there. I was given the assignment to work on some features requests related to the editor, submitted by customers or CSMs and grouped by PMs. While most of them were pretty straightforward, one of them, submitted by several customers, was requesting the possibility of adding links to images.

To me, this sounded like a strange behaviour to expect on an Intranet, and inconsistent with the current behavior, which is to open the preview (or lightbox) upon clicking an image.

I decided to investigate this by interviewing two CSMs who followed some of the customers who submitted the request. They explained to me that the customer wanted to replicate something that they were accustomed to when they were using Wordpress as their previous intranet. Specifically, Elementor (a Wordpress plugin) allowed them to create “promo boxes” where they could add images and call-to-actions and have them work as a sort of clickable banner.

This sounded a lot like another feature – Link Tiles – that had been in the backlog for some time and which we knew would have added a lot of value for all customers, not only the few ones who had the specific need to add links on images. When making product choices, we always try to not penalise everyone because of a few bad actors, but rather try to provide the most value for all customers following the “happy path”, or the main “river” (we have a lot of metaphors going around in the product team).

In a meeting together with the PM and a developer to do the estimations, we decided to prioritize Link Tiles, which was more expensive in terms of development but was totally worth it in the long term. We had some qualitative data about Link Tiles because we already had a version of it in an older part of the product.