Building and Designing a Comment System in Braze

Overview

Often, there are multiple team members in one Canvas who have different responsibilities. One teammate might be building the Canvas, while another person is checking the setup of that same Canvas. As marketing teams and their Canvases become more sophisticated, they require collaboration across various areas. As Canvas is a rich visual programming language, it can be difficult to efficiently transfer context on the execution details, as well as the Canvas strategy itself.

Role

I defined the system for comments across Braze, beginning in our flagship product, Canvas. I partnered with Product and UX Research to create multiple interview plans and owned usability testing.

Timeline

October 2022 - September 2023

Key Problem: Users don’t have an easy way to transcribe context when collaborating with their teammates.

Leading to problems such as...

  • Time spent transferring context and communicating about Canvases in tools other than Braze (e.g. Powerpoint, Notion, Slack, Asana) or live in meetings (e.g. reviewing via screen-share)

  • The additional software tool cost for these other tools

  • Time spent searching other tools for context or data on previous programs 

  • Cost of turnover or project handoffs between teammates, exacerbated by lack of contextual documentation about Canvases' setup

  • Time spent troubleshooting active Canvases where marketers have made a mistake while editing

  • Support costs and revenue impact of communications sent to incorrect users or that populate incorrectly

Approach

Knowing that 80% of Braze customers that use Canvas actively have a core customer engagement team of more than one marketer, we hypothesized that there was a need for an easy way for marketers to collaborate, and the data proved this. With new functionality such as Canvas Approvals in place, users frequently requested a way to comment within the Canvas before signing off.

Separately, in a Canvas Workflow Survey conducted, there we multiple requests for easier collaboration.

  • "Not being able to make comments in the canvas or see if someone else is in the canvas making changes because there are times when changes are overwritten by others."

  • "The hard part is that there aren’t any notes as to why or how the next step should be. If there were ways to annotate, that might help."

  • "There are a few ways to do things in a canvas, I find it hard to QA someone else's Canvas if it's not a very simple one if I don't get a walkthrough from the person that created it."

Early Exploration

Having a strong understanding of the problem, I started design discovery, mapping out questions I had along the way.

When sharing my explorations with engineering, we quickly learned that a post it note approach would not work, and we’d need to attach a comment to an object due to our current implementation. With these constraints, while simultaneously building out milestones with partnership from Product, I landed on two different approaches. One approach was focused on viewing one comment at one time, and the other was being able to view all comments at once. As we hadn’t shown any visuals to marketers yet, we wanted to understand how comprehensive of a view they wanted when they were in Canvas.

Approaches 1 and 2

Learnings

We tested with eight customers, and while there was a slight leaning toward the second approach, we learned more about the users’ requirements for a valuable feature. These requirements included: having a timestamp within the comment, ability to tag a teammate, receive notifications on the Canvas when comments are made, and eventually being able to comment anywhere in the Canvas, outside of just on a step. Additionally, users felt that being able to comment across different areas of Braze, such as in reports, on the dashboard, on segments, and more would be useful.

Scoping

This early concept testing lent to really valuable insights, most importantly, understanding our vision for Comments and how we could scope the functionality with engineering. I created the below mapping and shared with Product and Engineering partners to ensure we were aligned and also share considerations that were on my mind.

Usability Testing

We performed usability testing to assess discoverability, and the ability to perform tasks such as resolving comments, adding comments, tagging teammates and changing notification preferences. With positive results coming out of testing, we were able to begin Early Access with our customer base. During this time, we continued to monitor feedback, and I iterated on visual design aspects of the functionality, like making the sidebar wider for accessibility, and updating the icon to make it universally recognizable throughout Braze as “Comments Mode.” Additionally, technically, we were able to move comments closer to the steps, making it visually easier for users to decipher the step it is attached to.

Building Comments Across Braze

An important factor that went into design decisions for Comments was ensuring this could work in most, if not all experiences across Braze. I explored countless different experiences in order to help define the system I created. One exploration we still have on the roadmap is shown, which is incorporating notifications into Braze, beginning with Comments.

Impact

Canvas Comments GA’ed in September of 2023. Since then, we have seen usage and product adoption across all segments of our user base. Canvas Comments has been used nearly 5,000 times by 244 companies!

Next Steps

Our next steps include introducing Comments across the Canvas experience, such as within the Campaign Setup and Analytics screens. Additionally, we plan to conduct research on Comments and other collaboration features to help inform future roadmap opportunities.