January & February 2022

• Table of contents

Nutshell timeline refresh: final design

Getting started

This project began as a response to a variety of customer feedback about our [timelines](https://support.nutshell.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002554313-What-is-the-Nutshell-timeline-#:~:text=The timeline is your company,event type and event creator.). We knew that they were an outdated part of our application and a critical tool for our largest subset of users: busy sales representatives. We weren’t sure exactly what we wanted to tackle, but we knew that we wanted to do something. I was tasked with figuring out where we could have a meaningful impact, and then executing on it.

Project brief

I always begin projects with a brief. These briefs help me wrap my head around the full scope of a project. They guide my research, show me where the holes are, and provide a template for the project.

I follow a tried-and-true formula for project briefs:

• Background — what’s the current landscape?
• Research — what do we already know?
• Who’s it for — who are we building this for?
• User goals — key goals, nice-to-haves, stretch goals, and out of scope
• Nutshell goals — broken down into company and design priorities
• Open questions — what do we know that we don’t we know?

I share these briefs early on, reviewing them with the smaller design team and then with our larger customer-facing teams.

Team kickoff

After I finalized the brief, I scheduled a kickoff with the design team. I use a tool called Shuffleboard to run remote brainstorming meetings, including things like project kickoffs and retrospectives. Shuffleboard, which was built by a friend and fellow designer, allows me to create space for lots of generative ideas in meetings while making sure that even the quiet teammates are heard.

In this kickoff, we discussed our goals for the project so that we could put better definition around why we were addressing timelines. I also collected the questions that my team had about what we might be able to do and why.

This meeting resulted in a focused list of questions and goals, which gave me what I needed to start investigating the ins and outs of timeline troubles.

Interviews

I sat down with our customer support and sales teams to get answers to those questions raised in our kickoff. Our sales team was particularly helpful, because they’re part of our target users: sales reps who are regularly scanning timelines before and during sales calls. I also interviewed one of our long-time customers to hear about what his team was encountering.

I learned that there were two main UX/UI issues with the timeline that we could clean up:

1. Expanding and collapsing long entries in timelines causes usability issues
2. Outdated UI makes it difficult to scan and the clutter feels overwhelming

Project schedule