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OneSignal is a messaging company sending 11 billion notifications daily. Here we look at how to allow users to more easily search the dashboard and discover features, using a Command-K palette.
OneSignal is an Omnichannel platform with a simple and intuitive interface. Initially OneSignal was targeted towards a developer persona, but later additionally found market fit with Marketers wanting to use notifications as a way to re-engage users back into their application. Within the core team, we aimed to increase we increase accessibility and ease to use of our platform. One recurring customer pain point was the ability to navigate in an intuitive manner, as well as the ability to self-resolve issues.
This led to our first initial release of the OneSignal Search feature, using Command K. On average, we currently spend over 80% of our day context switching, so finding and discovering things with speed not only helps us stay on task but also lightens our cognitive load. Fundamentally, any form of search aims to save you time and make you more productive.
Lead Product Manager and Designer | OneSignal | 2021
Page Load and Performance Issues
OneSignal sends approximately 11 billion messages daily, having a unique scalability challenge. This can impact page loading of the dashboard with data queries and waiting for last byte. Providing an alternative experience such as a command palette can reduce visibility of this issue and show the responsive nature of our dashboard, whilst empowering users.
Creative Coding
OneSignal has rapidly scaled to add features, meaning information architecture has fallen behind. Additionally there is no in-app product education to introduce key features. This means features can be hard to discover, impacting adoption rates. Search provides a way for us to reduce the amount of time a user spends on learning the tool, through feature discoverability. Instead it allows the user to refocus their time on the task in-hand, to achieve their goals.
Creative Coding
OneSignal had not yet developed reusable search endpoints. Yet through user research, we identified that power users have a great need for entity search due to the large volume of messages and users. This meant there was a user need, but also a need to phase search to ensure we can deliver in an iterative and quick manner. This meant we phased the introduction of search, to firstly test if a navigation would add value.
Prototyping
Currently we have a large developer user base whom focus on API usage, with a growing marketer base with usage in our dashboard. Hence encourages developers to use the dashboard in a way that is akin to code IDEs.Investment into our dashboard for marketers, but strong self-serve developer base, who will increasingly use our dashboard for analytics and advanced features
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Firstly troubleshooting, allows users to understand why they have experienced failure and secondly it allows users the ability of being able to fix it. By allowing users to troubleshoot more easily, we reduce the burden on support teams, whilst also assisting our large free self-serve customer base.
As the omnichannel market grows in competitors, it's important we provide differentiating features, whilst additionally reflecting on product trends within the wider market.
Across apps that present recommendations, users are often intrigued as to why an item has been recommended, even furious if a recommendation is incorrect. With Social DNA, we wanted to present users back their transformed data in a meaningful way hence did this via profile tags of their inferred interests. Users could then additionally delete and add tags, which allowed a feedback loop for algorithmic improvements.
Whether you're a fan of keyboard shortcuts or a newbie, shortcuts are easy to use for everyone. We’ve added the most popular actions to shortcut your way at lightning speed. Quickly load search through a simple command + k, or find all of the available shortcuts through simply typing '?'
Search has been a dashboard-only feature, but there is an opportunity to bring other platforms together to provide a unified search experience, as the CMS does not currently have a search functionality. As the degree of resources of the CMS increases and the user base continues to grow, users will need easy and accessible ways to find and discover our content.
Executed commands
Search Opens
Hours Coded
More Traffic
Moving beyond navigation, we’d like to begin incorporating advanced actions as part of users integration with the editors. For example, allowing users being able to quickly copy content, create duplicates, insert data tags and key email tags.
Our power users have potentially millions of subscribers, and send hundreds of unique messages weekly across their user base. It becomes critical for our users to easily find and refer back to their campaigns in order to measure success. Users search through pages of messages, with no easy way to currently search content, users, or results. Here users have been requesting ways for us to increase information accessibility.
Search has been a dashboard-only feature, but there is an opportunity to bring other platforms together to provide a unified search experience, as the CMS does not currently have a search functionality. As the degree of resources of the CMS increases and the user base continues to grow, users will need easy and accessible ways to find and discover our content.
