Shared Workspaces (aka Spaces)

Overview

In an effort to enhance user activation, the “Spaces” project set out to provide new users with access to colleague-created workspaces that were populated with relevant data and insights. Spaces was the sum of a robust feature set including massive updates to our global navigation, a new surface area in the app for shared workspaces, new flows for managing objects’ owning spaces, and more. Spaces launched early in 2024 and is currently available to all Enterprise customers at FullStory.

Role

Product design lead

Researcher

output

Navigation updates

Beta Opt-in/out

Empty states

Final mocks

Problem

Struggling to Access Relevant Data Hinders Activation

New Enterprise FullStory users often struggle to find data and objects relevant to their needs, making it harder to quickly realize the platform’s value. This challenge during a crucial stage of the customer journey has contributed to lower activation rates.
Goal

Enhancing User Activation Through Immediate Data Access

Our goal was to enable new users to quickly find relevant data and objects upon signing in. By streamlining access, we aimed to boost activation metrics and establish a foundation for future collaboration-focused features.
Research

Researching the Path to Meaningful Collaboration

The concept of Spaces emerged as a response to long-standing user challenges around collaboration. For years, feedback from customers and prospects consistently highlighted the underlying need for more semantic structure to the way objects within Fullstory were displayed.

Quantitative data highlighted a clear challenge. Engagement with the newly released Home experience was low, revealing a critical issue: extensive setup was required before users could find value. This gap was especially frustrating for users joining existing organizations, who felt the pain most acutely.

I joined the team shortly before the Alpha release, contributing to a project already grounded in thoughtful early research. The team had conducted a robust combination of empirical data analysis and concept testing, involving internal stakeholders, user look-alikes, and real users, to validate the perceived value of proposed solutions. Building on this foundation, my focus was on refining insights, advancing testing, and launching the V1 release of Spaces for Enterprise users.

Special thanks to Tony Robledo and Curtis McCrady for their outstanding foundational work, which set the stage for this project’s success.
Research

Identifying our target users for Spaces

The Spaces feature set was squarely focused on delivering value for our Enterprise customers that belonged to the Consumer persona. This persona is characterized as being less technically savy relative to their Builder persona counterparts. This means it requires more mental effort and at times causes more friction for them to find objects they're seeking. While they do derive value from Fullstory, they often lack the know-how to dive deeply into topics.
The Builder persona, in comparison, is characterized as a user with considerable technical skill. These users are able to navigate Fullstory with ease and typically set up canonical objects that Consumers in their org reference regularly.
Timeline

An overview of how this project was executed

This project can be broken up into five phases. Each phase built off of the one before it eventually leading us to our General Availability release of Spaces.

Discovery

This phase was focused on aligning stakeholders and the team on purpose and intention of the project. To do so, we leveraged a tool developed by Spotify called the Thoughtful Execution Tree. Leveraging this tool allowed us to embrace collaboration across a wide range of opinions before a single pixel was placed or line of code written. It's a key part of my ideal workflow to this day.

During this phase we also mined existing customer feedback both from our in-app survey responses and past customer calls. With a solid understanding of what we wanted to do and why, we then worked on diverging and converging on our solution ideas. These were based off of the finalized hypotheses in our Thoughtful Execution Tree. From there we proceeded with some concept testing to ensure that the solutions we landed on were aligned with what users' expectations were.

Alpha · MV0

In this phase we focused on building the simplest form of the collaborative workspaces solution we landed on. The scale and scope of this release was meant to only enough to beginning getting feedback on our solution through actual use. The cohort for this release included select customers that had already signaled interest in this upcoming feature and internal teams. We captured feedback from these different channels in a centralized Notion document which we were later able to further break down into key themes.

Those feedback themes were
  • Frustration over cluttered navigation
  • Inconsistent object-creation flows
  • Too many Spaces
  • Difficulty locating objects
  • Too many Spaces

Beta · MVP

This phase focused on responding to what we learned in our Alpha testing. It also included some polish and experience optimizations as the path toward the GA release was starting to become more clear. It was during this stage that we ran our Task analysis study. This ensured that the changes we made as a result of the Alpha phase would not negatively impact existing workflows.

V1 · GA & Followup projects

With a fully validated solution, we shipped Spaces to our Enterprise users and eagerly awaited the results.

In the meantime, we used what we learned in this project to inform the next two quarters of work. While Spaces focused on our Consumer persona, getting individuals oriented within Calendly, this next leg of work would empower our Builder persona. The broad theme was to reduce object within an organization by allowing Builders to more easily manage objects and visibility. Here are the three workstreams we landed on:

Sharing & visibility

Ensuring scratch objects don’t make their way into the main set of objects in an organization

Bulk actions

Allows Builders to optimize a large amount of objects at once. This is especially helpful for use cases like reducing duplicates.

New permission role

Viewer role which allowed non-editable access to the org’s objects

Monitor

After the release of our V1 of Spaces there were three KPIs we wanted to observe. Most were identified in the Discovery phase while the third came about as company initiative while we were in our Alpha.

Activation

While we did not meet our target of 5% lift in Activation, we did reach 2% with data trending in a positive direction.

Enterprise deal win rate

This goal sought to ensure that we would never again lose on a competitive deal with enterprise customers as a result of the collaborative workspaces feature gap. We nailed this metric at 100%.

Tool engagement

This goal came after the project started and sought to increase usage of Product Analytics tools, including features like Retention Charts. We surpassed the 15% target, achieving a 17% lift in this metric.
Visuals

Empty States

Ideal empty states guide the user to the optimal setup of your feature in order to maximize value. Error states should communicate not just the error, but also the corresponding steps to fix the issue or further educate the user. Below I have an example of each from the Spaces project.

First Use

The First Use empty state drives the user to take the remaining steps to define an ideal Space: Invite teammates, Add or Create objects for the Space’s library, and Create a Section.

Error State

We created a few error states for this feature but I highlighted the ‘No mach found’ use case. In this scenario a user has entered a string that does not match anything in the current Space’s library. I present the user with the cause for the error as well as two possible paths forward: broaden their search to all Spaces, or Create an item similar to what they were looking for.
Visuals

Decluttering navigation

Our navigation went through three iterations over the course of this project. The Alpha iteration was received well in terms of capabilities. The most notable of the new capabilities included an easy-to-find Create button as well as the presence of Spaces. However the sentiment was largely that the navigation was simply too cluttered to easily... navigate 😅

I addressed this in the Beta by doing things like obscuring certain interactions behind hover states, condensing & removing sections, and bringing more contrast to the Create button. This iteration also brought about a quick workflow for hiding and showing Spaces. While the capability was appreciated, the showing / hiding workflow was not ideal for customers with >10 spaces (which was a non-trivial share of customers at the time). We also ran into some internal friction with condensing as many sections as we did.

By the third iteration we'd found the sweet spot between internal alignment and ease-of use for customers. This is the iteration that found its way into the hands of customers when we rolled out to General Availability.
Research

we ran a task analysis study before ga

As noted in the timeline, our Beta phase included a final Task Analysis study before we were ready to roll out to General Availability (GA). The tasks were constructed to ensure that users were still able to successfully completely key workflows. It also served as a final measure as to whether our changes based on the Alpha feedback were solving the problems users shared.

Evaluating User Differentiation Between Global and Space Libraries

The objective of this task was to evaluate users' ability to differentiate between the Global Library, encompassing all objects within the organization, and a Space's Library, containing objects owned by that particular Space. Additionally, the task provided valuable feedback regarding terminology.

Initially, we used "Libraries" in the global navigation to denote multiple collections and "Library" in the singular form within a Space. Users, however, associated the term "Libraries" more with something akin to a JavaScript library. After testing, we decided to use "Library" consistently for both contexts, relying on contextual clues to differentiate between the two, which proved to be effective.

Assessing User Accessibility to the Newly Positioned "Tools" Section

This task focused on determining if users could successfully find a subset of our less-utilized features that were moved to a new section in the navigation labeled "Tools." Positioned at the bottom of the navigation menu, it was crucial to verify that users could still easily locate this section when necessary.

Interim Solutions for Showing and Hiding Spaces

This task tested the ability of users to hide and subsequently unhide a specific Space, addressing feedback from initial demos where users struggled to navigate among numerous Spaces. To offer an interim solution without delaying Spaces' release, I designed this simplified interaction pattern. This approach temporarily mitigated the issue, allowing time for the development of a more advanced search functionality for Spaces. The design balanced immediate user needs with the longer-term goal of enhancing navigability.

Evaluating Navigation Usability for Starred Items

This task was aimed at determining if users could still locate a specific starred object within the revamped navigation system. The design of the starred items underwent a slight modification to enhance their alignment with the new hierarchical structure implemented across each section. These changes were essential to ensure that users could effortlessly access their prioritized items amidst the updated navigation layout.

Enhancing Object Discoverability with New Filter Components for Spaces

This task evaluated the usability of the newly developed filter components for Spaces, designed with a pill-shaped form that displayed each object type alongside its corresponding icon to make them more scannable. By adopting this new design, we achieved greater consistency in presenting object types across both navigation and library views, significantly improving the ease with which users can discover the full range of object types available.
Visuals

Spaces · Featured Items

This is the V1 of the Spaces featured items landing page that went out with our General Availability release. The featured tab of a Space was the first view a user would see when clicking on a Space from the left navigation. Int he V1 release this view could be curated by members of the Space.

All Items tab

To see all of the items contained in a Space, the user would click on the All items tab. Here they would see an index of items, the ability to search for a specific item, and filtering by type.

Clear add & Create

Alpha testing highlighted confusion between creating and adding objects. To address this, we standardized ‘Create’ for making new objects, always paired with a plus sign, and ‘Add’ for incorporating existing ones, using a plus-in-circle icon. This approach improved clarity while keeping interactions intuitive and consistent.
Bonus

Addressing Technical Debt to Improve Space Attribution

The release of Spaces introduced this concept of an owning Space for objects. In other words, you could now have a Metric created in Space X be visible in Space Y. At the time our object cards were in serious need of some attention after lots of technical debt had accrued. This issue was a contributing factor to my project to clean up our Object Cards. The new cards had a consistent home for the owning Space’s badge with a corresponding tooltip. Updating the object cards was a substantial chunk of work and required buy-in gathering from stakeholders within and outside of our team. You can learn more about the updated Object Cards project here.

Results

Positively impacted our KPIs both leading and lagging

While we fell short of our 5% target for Activation, achieving a 2% lift with positive trends was a step in the right direction. On the enterprise front, we achieved a perfect 100% win-rate, ensuring collaborative workspaces were no longer a competitive gap in deals with enterprise customers. Additionally, we exceeded our goal to increase Product Analytics tool usage, surpassing the 15% target with a 17% lift.

Collaborators

  • Product Manager
  • Engineering Manager

That's a wrap for this project!

See more of my work from

FullStory

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Copyright Bryan Lewis, 2025