Skeema Tab Manager

My Role

UX Designer

Duration

3 months, May 2022 - August 2022

Team

Niki Kittur (CEO), Yongsung Kim (Product Manager), Logan Stahl (Engineer)

Tool

Figma

Project Overview

THE CHALLENGE

Resolve user retention problems for a new tab manager

Skeema is a start-up incubated at Carnegie Mellon University. The tab manager is primarily built as a Chrome extension and has refreshed hundreds of users’ browsing experiences. However, Skeema lost 49% users in its beta version. To further expand the influence of Skeema, the team decided to investigate the reasons for users' leaving.

Skeema: A Tab Manager that helps manage all links in one place

Check out Skeema Website

As featured in

Strategies

Care user experience at different stages

As the only designer in the team, I led the designing of the following 2 impactful features in 3 months to enrich user experiences by uncovering the deep pattern of users' browsing expectations.

IMPACT

Business: More than retaining Users

The new calm start page was launched in July and magnificently improved Skeema. Meanwhile, the new feature contributed to the viral user growth during the product hunt in October and attracted several investors.

dESIGN A CALM START PAGE

survey

21% of users dislike Skeema starting page

To understand why Skeema lost users, I studied the uninstalling survey and learnt that Skeema being their new tab page is the main underlying reason.

Uninstalling Survey: What's the main reason to uninstall Skeema? (473 responses)

problem

The task list at start page overwhelmed users

To dig deep into the phenomenon, I conducted interviews with 3 users by recruiting through our Skeema user community Slack channel and found that they are frustrated by the current task list at start.

opportunity

How can we attract users to use Skeema at first sight?

Considering Skeema mission of revolutionizing users' browsing experience, I decided to

Final Design >

challenge

How Might We Provide Users with A simple yet Powerful Start Page?

While having a neat page to start is important, having necessary information to act also counts for users. To better design the information architecture, I divided the information into the Calm Start Components and Skeema core functions.

Key Design Decision 01

Digestible Information Architecture with Consistent Experience

A better architecture makes the information more interpretable. Enlightened by the decluttering strategies from the relevant products, the revised start page improves users’ digestibility and effectively reduces visual noise.

Adjacent Products

Design Principles for Decluttering

However, putting the search bar is not consistent with the Skeema design.

I explored several different patterns of the access of search bars. The revised start page maintains the search bar at the exact location over pages and boosts a consistent user experience.

Key Design Decision 02

Customize Quick Links with Multiple Levels of Call-to-Action

After launching the first Sprint of our calm start page, we got a lot of positive feedback from our users. Meanwhile, we are also hearing quite a few users ask to customize the quick links.

Embed the Call-to-Action into User Flow

I fleshed out the user flow and prototyped on the wireframe with call-to-actions.

Key Design Decision 03

Personalize Start Page to Cater to Different Users' Needs

We kept receiving feedback from our user community and found that Skeema users have different tastes towards components on the start page. To provide with them the flexibility and autonomy to create their own start page, we would like to introduce the personalization function in the latest update.

What would you like to see on your new tab page? (Survey, 75 responses)

Customize Components in One Place

There are mainly 2 patterns in customizing components. To avoid repetitive functions and reduce extra noises, I adopted the strategy of using an integral control menu to allow users toggle on/off components and change the background image.

FINAL DESIGN

A Simple and Powerful Start Page Nudges Users to Explore Skeema

ENGAGEMENT

Daily Inspiration on Start

Peace your mind with a new inspiring photo
‍
Remind and access your important projects with a digestible layout

CUSTOMIZATION

Take Charge of Your Shortcuts within Seconds

Add/edit/delete links with actionable indications

PERSONALIZATION

Widgets Customized to You

Show/hide features as you like to stay focused

QUICK SAVE POP-UP redesign

context

Users want to save tabs into Skeema across all web pages

Users enjoy Skeema because it enables them to multi-task and neatly track all their tabs. However, going back and forth to save tabs into Skeema is a pain.

However, there are a lot of frictions in the current pop-up design when saving tabs

Final Design >

Competitive analysis

Identify design principles for quickly save tabs

Learning from several mainstream browser-related products, I concluded the following principles to guide the design.

Intuitive Layout

Relevant information should be grouped together to allow users take actions all in one place

Contextual Call-to-Actions

The CTA should be focused on the most important field

Smart Destination

Provide users with a most relevant folder as the default saving destination

information architecture

Improve user experience through rearranging the actions according to the relatedness

To achieve an intuitive layout, I redesigned the layout.

Also, to reduce the friction of sifting through a lot of projects and choose the destination, I proposed to the team to use AI to suggest the most likely project.

Integrating AI project suggestion function into design

With the new insights, I refined the layout and embedded an AI suggestion feature to provide users with a smart destination.

wireframe

Accommodating multiple use cases

Aside from saving tabs into an existed project, I also took the flow of creating a new project into consideration.

Creating a new project with a more intuitive feedback

To further crafting the experience of user input, I tried out different feedback patterns.

Extend user ability to save multiple tabs

During the usability tests, I found that users also have the need to save multiple tabs at once. So I explored 2 patterns and chose to use the Tab component for a smooth transition between saving a single tab and saving multiple tabs.

Key Takeaways

Solve big problems with a small cost

Working in a start-up size team (as the only designer collaborating closely with one programmer), we adopted an agile approach with a "Sprint" mindset that enables us to iterate the product more efficiently (achieve a main deliverable once every two weeks). In such a fast-paced environment, time is so precious that we cannot afford weeks or months of user research. Instead, we maximize the value of small-size interviews (3-5 users) to rapidly prototype the identified improvement points. This strategy allows our product to quickly evolve toward users’ expectations.

Different perspectives maximize team effort

A team consists of members who bring different skill sets. Breaking down "silos" can spark better design ideas. Though as a UX designer, my involvement in synthesizing research insights from competitive audits, user persona, and scenario definition help me better emphasize users’ feelings and understand product missions. By orchestrating perspectives from different team members and stakeholders, I could foster more insightful ideas during my ideation and prototyping. In addition, by providing a few design options, I usually received more constructive feedback than bringing only one self-assumed optimum design.