Contribution
I led the sharing experience redesign initiative across the OneDrive web and mobile entry points, in collaboration with a cross-functional team of UX designers, project managers, and engineers, to enhance its features, including Link Settings.
User feedback
OneDrive’s Link Settings Dialog allows to scope the audience, change editorial permissions and apply additional security features like “Block download”, “Expiration date”, etc. After conducting the benchmark study, we identified several drawbacks in the current design.
The “Link settings” title wasn’t clear, especially for customers coming from other cloud products; the scope names were “confusing”; people had difficulties choosing between them.
Explorations
During the sharing experience brainstorming sessions, we also ran a design sprint to explore how we can improve all the drawbacks.
We renamed the dialog to “Sharing settings” so users would not associate this experience only with links.
We rewrote the scope names to make them shorter and easier to comprehend.
We introduced info-buttons with scope descriptions to inform people of their capabilities.
We added the Manage access entry point to the “People with existing access” scope so users could look up who these people are.
We introduced the “Role selector” dropdown inside the settings dialog to make this experience coherent.
Besides that, we designed the seamless external sharing flow when people need to click only once to change link settings from “company” to “specific people.”
User research
Then we tested our new design conducting a user research study.
Iterations
We received split results and organized a wall review with designers from outside the feature team and engineers to find other feasible solutions.
In this version, we chose to show selected scope descriptions on the surface; updated scope strings to make them clear; transformed the Manage access entry point into face-piles so people could see who the file "shared with" at a glance.
Next steps
Soon, we will be moving this project into engineering and conducting AB experiments in our “dogfood” environment.
Thanks for reading!