Sharely

A free-form CMS designed for sharing content

Sharely is a potential solution to an information sharing challenge I’ve experienced many times over the years. That, sharing content through online platforms typically requires the user to shape their content in order to fit the platform. As a result of this, an incredible amount of online tools are circulating that solve specific information sharing challenges, while avoiding the underlying personalization challenge of information.

Even free-form platforms like Notion subtly and not-so-subtly direct their users to shape their content in order to ‘best’ use their platform. These directions are understandable — the intention is to guide users into using the platform a certain way, such that it is easy to understand what to do and what to avoid. The free-form or personalized aspects not only help users get value from the platform, but also foster a positive relationship associated with creating something personal to the user.

I wanted to explore the idea of a platform that isn’t necessarily designed for any particular audience. A platform that would emphasize personalization of content sharing with minimal direction over restrictions that may hamper the ultimate goal of personalization.

Identifying the challenge

Fundamentally, the value of Sharely is in the emphasis of a free-form content management experience that allows its users to more easily manage their content from a single place. This is an alternative approach to some common solutions that already exist:

• Design & development of a website or web application
• Use of a platform designed for a particular audience
• Use of multiple platforms for different types of content

Each of these solutions poses some immediate challenges, whether it be the resource cost of developing a website and or managing multiple platforms. Or, not having all of the customization options required by a user in a single platform, resulting in ‘work-around’ approaches to managing content.

What if there was a solution that provided the presentation of information like a website, the personalization of a free-form CMS, and the sharing abilities of a cloud drive?

Exploring the ‘free-form’ concept

The key aspect of Sharely that makes it unique is the approach taken to free-form functionality for storing, managing, and presenting content. To help simplify this concept, I considered the following:

• Content of all types should be allowed
• Users should be able to customize the presentation of their content
• Users should be able to create a standardization system of their content

These considerations ensure that personalization would be the foundation for all platform design choices. The various areas in the platform would all be in support of the underlying need to store, share, and manage content from a single place — for any team or individual.

Creating a taxonomy

Some of the early work involved the creation of a ‘Sharely taxonomy’, which would be used to define the different parts of the platform during the planning & design phases. An important part of this taxonomy involves defining the content areas of the platform:

• Spaces are the highest level of organization, and are intended to be used for an individual’s account or for a team account
• Areas allow for easily categorizing content into different topics or teams
• Collections and entries are organizers that content is directly added into
• Fields are the lowest level of organization, representing the actual content elements being added by the user

This taxonomy establishes a hierarchy that can be used to quickly understand how the platform works as a new user. The user creates their space, sets up some areas based on the topics they’re interested in, before using collections to organize their entries. Importantly, this approach is similar to how other platforms allow users to create their spaces — helping reduce the initial learning curve.

Solving personalized standardization

We naturally categorize our information, creating associations between objects and information we associate with them. Building off of this concept, fields became the most basic way for users to add their content in Sharely. Users select the most appropriate field type, such as a short text or date field, then add in their content. What fields provide is a method to organize content at a foundational level, allowing content to more easily be managed across preset groups of fields.

This approach meant that Sharely would allow users to create free-form entries when needed, while allowing users to standardize their content into customizable presets. For more casual users, these preset tools may serve as an occasional time saver, but become incredibly useful when storing large amounts of content into the platform.

Translating this experience into screens

A personal goal in this project was to ensure that Sharely would work well at a mobile-level, so that the platform could be usable by any person — at any place or time. There would definitely be some functions that may be best done on a desktop device, but the design objective was to focus on a mobile-first user experience.

To begin mapping out what the various screens could look like, I started with listing out all of the key actions and what steps of the user journey required its own unique screen. I began designing in the order that the screens would be initially seen by a user, helping me understand what information should be visible at different points of various user journeys.

After some experimentation and test journeys using some simple prototyping techniques, I was able to create what I believed were the vast majority of screens required. More specifically, this involved deciding the placement of key screen elements like a mobile navigation and quick actions that changed depending on the area you were in.

Creating the look and feel

I sketched out and later refined a logo that I believed best captured the point of Sharely: to share information with others in a personalized space. This led to a simple icon-mark element that featured two elements connected together through a shared medium. A little abstract, but this was the visual representation I thought was important when associating a brand mark with the purpose of the platform.

I wanted Sharely to be inclusive, but not too visually noisy as a brand while users are trying to manage their content. As a result, I emphasized rounded corners across the various UI elements and relied on a blue-grey colour palette that presented a relatively unobtrusive visual experience. I coupled these choices with a relatively modern sans-serif font that could be easily read at small font-sizes, allowing for more complex typography choices when needed across the screens.

Developing a design system

Graphic design decisions like colour, fonts, and a brand mark were helpful in establishing a style, but I still needed to develop a more detailed system for creating the UI elements. I created a design system of UI elements that featured a variety of consistent variables throughout.

These variables included a spacing system that relied on 4px increments, helping me develop a series of scales for font properties and spacing between elements. Additionally, some simple colour variables were used to help with the consistent use of greys to differentiate UI elements from backgrounds & each other.

The last major part of my design system for Sharely involved creating comprehensive components I could easily re-use and manage across my design files. This work included setting up various component states and hidden layers depending on the context of how the UI element was being used by the user.

Who should be featured using Sharely?

This is a seemingly simple question that I put a considerable amount of thought into. Referring to some of the earlier comparable platform observations, my notes revealed that a majority of closely-comparable platforms were task-management focused. As part of my design mockups, I wanted to ensure that the example users aligned with those most often to use these types of platforms.

I created a fake digital marketing agency called ‘Monster Agency’ as the example team for my mockup screens. If Sharely could work for a team like this, a task-focused team with multiple content priorities, then it would be able to work for nearly any team.

I would later create some screens for various other teams & individuals to help further visually explain how Sharely could be applied to other contexts.

How adding content works

Adding, managing, and presenting content in Sharely is arguably the most important feature. All of the other features are intended to support the adding and sharing of a user’s content. Because of this importance, I put a considerable amount of time into refining this part of the user experience.

Adding content typically involves the following process:

• The user creates a new entry or selects from a preset for an area they want to add content into
• Some visual prompts are provided to begin assembling the fields that a user can add their content into, selecting from a variety of field-types depending on what they’re adding
• At any point, the user can pause this content ‘editing’ experience to toggle a design view that allows them to adjust how the content in their fields is being presented

After this process, the user has the option to share their design-view with others, or avoid sharing if they know their existing team/collaborators will view this new entry on their own time.

This is where the concept of a free-form field-first experience really shines in Sharely. Users are able to accomplish a large variety of content-related tasks, that resemble creating a web page or presentation document without needing to leave the platform.

The sharing experience

Obviously sharing is in the name, so it also received a good amount of my attention while I designed the screens for Sharely. Within the platform, sharing resembles the experience of using a cloud drive:

• The user finds the entries or areas they want to share
• A set of access options are presented for each item that they can reference against a contact
• A notification message is sent to the sharing recipient with access instructions

I believed this process should be as close as possible to cloud drives, due to the massive adoption across the world — meaning users would naturally expect a similar process. Perhaps slightly differently here, is the ability to share multiple items at once, instead of the traditional ‘one-at-a-time’ approach. This meant that users would be able to more efficiently share with others when working on more complex tasks or projects.

Let’s work back a bit, how do areas work?

Areas function as teams or topics, depending on if the user is working in a collaborative or individual space. Regardless of the space type, areas are the main ‘buckets’ for how a user categorizes their content in the platform.

When working in a more collaborative context, areas act as a logical recurring entry-point into the day-to-day tasks in Sharely. Users sign in and quickly navigate to the areas they are working in before existing to work on a different task external to the platform.

This idea of recurrence would be very important in helping users create their own ‘natural rhythms’ for how they use the platform. Areas could also look entirely different from each other because of the personalizations made by those working in them — tailored to each user’s own needs of the platform.

Embedding personalization into ‘views’

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of factors that affect how content should be organized and presented outside of a presentation scenario that affect how easy it is to navigate. Consider the traditional views offered in a cloud drive, such as a tile or list view, which make it easier to navigate different types of content being organized in a drive.

Views would become essential in allowing users to personalize the platform to their own workflows, preferences, and needs. When in an area or collection, a view option would allow users to toggle between different options depending on these considerations. Additionally, users would be able to create their own views based off of the fields included in their entries.

This would immediately help users get more value from the platform, since they would now be able to see information faster than ever before across their entries. Coupled with the ability to share with others, users could quickly create truly personalized experiences for their teams, collaborators, clients, and more.

Enabling more collaboration through chats

Most collaborative platforms available these days embrace some level of chat communication. This allows for consolidating discussions to the same areas that content is being worked on, typically reducing the number of tools a team needs as part of their workflows.

Because sharing is a key part of the platform experience, I sought to include a chat feature that would allow for communicating at different levels in Sharely. This multi-level chat system is more unique than traditional approaches, that will usually reserve chats to higher levels of content organization (e.g. reserving the chat for a space or area, not necessarily a collection or entry).

It is possible that too many chat levels can dilute the overall communication within a team, and even over complicate the chat experience. However, I felt as though this approach would align well with the personalization aspects of Sharely, which put more power in the user’s ability to dictate how the platform should be used.

Within the chats themselves, would be a traditional experience of using conversations to communicate amongst a group on a topic or direct conversation. Ultimately, this ensured that users would at a minimum have the opportunity to embrace a chat experience if that helped them within their own workflows & team culture.

Designing a following or subscribed experience in a workspace

As a user or team would add to their Sharely space over time, the need for a following or subscribed feature would become more important. This is because as content volume increases so does the time needed to access this content. A subscribed option would allow users to quickly identify the areas, collections, or entries they are concerned with to help maintain ease of content accessibility.

This functionality would extend to the dashboard, allowing for users to quickly navigate to the content they’re likely interested in as soon as they sign in. A subscribed area would be dedicated for filtering through subscribed items, meaning users have multiple methods of accessing the content they’re subscribed to.

Ending up at the beginning: the dashboard

Knowing now that the dashboard would be primarily reserved for quick access to subscribed items, there really weren't too many more creative decisions I wanted to consider while working on these screens. I believed it was better to keep the dashboard as simple as possible, so that there was a minimal chance to overwhelm users in higher content volume Sharely spaces.

However, I did have some original ideas that I believed could be quite meaningful to certain types of users. These ideas involved allowing users to set up some sort of a visual chart layout that could help quickly summarize quantitative metrics of their content. This could include project statuses, cash flow, number of ratings, and more.

Additionally, with the emergence of AI being used in online platforms, I also considered some sort of AI tool that could provide a more qualitative summary for users. For example, an AI tool could summarize recent conversations, suggest entries to work on, or highlight discrepancies in a user/ team’s content standardization.

Considering monetization strategies

Looking beyond the screens, I considered a few monetization strategies that I believed could efficiently scale Sharely as a concept into a thriving enterprise. Among these strategies, I determined that the best approach would likely involve relying on team accounts as the primary revenue source, with individual accounts being free.

This approach would be very similar to how the comparable platform, Notion, has grown so quickly and efficiently. Provide a free entry point that individuals use to become more closely attached to the platform, as a result of creating a personalized space that they feel attached to. Over time, these users become Sharely advocates in the teams they join, because they already possess skills, knowledge, and an awareness of the platform.

Team accounts would be charged by the number of users, and as a team grows; the revenue from each team scales alongside their growth. This would minimize loss of revenue on growing teams, while making the platform more accessible for smaller teams.

Proposed initial marketing strategies

Like many online platforms, targeting a specific user group as part of the initial marketing would likely have the best user growth results for Sharely. However, with such a free-form and customizable user experience, it was initially quite difficult to determine who these users should be.

The most appropriate user group I found would be small businesses that lack the resources for alternative options to Sharely. For example, a small business that does not have the resources or time to put up a website — could create a Sharely space and link it on their online accounts as a website alternative. Or, a small creative team that needs an inexpensive option for storing project, client, and team documentation to help them standardize their services.

In addition to the target group, I considered a simple landing page website with social media marketing to be the most resource & time efficient approach for increasing digital reach. A member of the Sharely team could reach out directly to the target user group, while using social media to direct as much traffic as possible to a simple website that allows users to start for free.

Although the initial target group would be these small businesses, an increasing social media presence would naturally result with an influx of free users. These individuals would become organic champions of Sharely in their professional teams and networks, providing a steady stream of free marketing through a valuable platform experience.

Concluding thoughts

Sharely represents a concept that I am very passionate about: understanding how we as individuals and teams personalize our communication to ourselves and each other. Sharely would be an exploration into this subject, allowing for its users to gain value through content personalization, while gaining revenue as a product of the value it provides to businesses.

It symbolizes a unique approach to content management systems, embracing more free-form UI decisions to better serve a larger potential user base. Although some of these decisions may lead to confusion as a natural result of creating untraditional user experiences — I believe it’s very possible that we may also end up with invaluable insights into how these platforms should be designed for users.

If you’re interested in the Sharely concept, and or would like to learn more about my design and creative process, please feel free to contact me. Thank you for taking the time to explore this concept with me.