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Designed Subtask Feature

Role
Product Designer
Company
Taskworld
Timeline
Aug to Oct 2020
Platform
Web & Mobile
Overview

Taskworld is a cloud-based collaboration platform that offers features to help teams organize their work. It provides an all-in-one collaboration platform, which includes a chat feature, making it a solution for project teams.

Problem
Taskworld did not have a way for users to break down large tasks into smaller, more manageable steps. This means complex projects can feel overwhelming, making it harder to stay on track.
Outcome
The subtask feature is seeing good adoption, with 11% of users now creating subtasks each week. This suggests the feature is helping users manage their projects more effectively.
Role
As a designer on this project, I teamed up with another designer and a product manager. We refined the user needs, designed a solution to address their needs, and tested it with real users. We also collaborated with the development team to bring the solution to life!
Key Skills
  • User Research
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Usability Testing
  • Figma wireframing, prototyping and UI
Background

We started the project with a hypothesis that users need to break down a task into constituent executable pieces to give clarity to the executor. Taskworld had 3 levels of execution structure; project, task, and checklist, which is not enough for users.

Research

The purpose of the research was to get an understanding of what patterns our users typically do in regards to task management. This research is the summary of the user's feedback and requests about Subtasks and Checklist items that we have gathered.

I categorized our support requests into these categories

Problem

There's no way for users to break their tasks into smaller items with full-fledged task's functionalities

Key Insights

1. Set Date Functionality

Users consistently express challenges in task breakdown due to the absence of a feature allowing them to set dates for individual items.

2. Subtasks

Most users mentioned subtasks, some of them even called checklists as subtasks. These are the properties that they said they would like to have on checklists.

  • Set Date
  • File Attachments
  • Description
  • Time spent record
  • Reminder
  • Comments

3. Display

Users are keen on having alternative views for subtasks with requests such as:

  • Timeline / Gantt chart
  • Overview page: A centralized page providing an overview of all tasks

4. Competitor Insights

Mention of competitors, such as Asana and Trello, indicates points for consideration:

  • Asana: 8% of users have brought up Asana in discussions about subtask functionality, suggesting a benchmark for comparison.
  • Trello: Trello's checklist features, including the ability to manage multiple checklists and hide completed ones, have been highlighted by users.
Competitor Analysis

I chose and compared the major competitors with similar services and business models to Taskworld, aiming to determine what aspect we should consider for the template feature.

The competitors provide either subtasks or checklists to break down the tasks. However, ClickUp is the only product that provides both subtasks and checklist functionalities.

Research Summary

According to the research and brainstorming with the product manager and other designers, we decided to aim for a subtask feature as a new way of breaking down the task instead of improving the checklist functionality to provide more levels of execution structure.

Design
Low-fidelity wireframes

Subtask section on the task properties

Create subtasks

Subtasks on Task properties

Complete a subtask

Hi-fidelity design
Create a subtask

User can create subtasks from the main task properties

Duplicate subtasks

Ability for users to duplicate a task with subtask. User can also duplicate a subtask under the main task or as a separate task.

Multi-location subtasks

Users can move subtasks freely from the main task. And add subtask to another project like a normal task.

Subtasks view settings

Ability to show and hide subtask list on the main task.

Usability Testing

Usability test with 4 people

Success

  1. All users could create subtasks and navigate to the subtasks they created from the board.
  2. All users showed interest in using the subtask feature to organize their work more efficiently.
  3. The users found the option to choose whether to view the subtask as a separate task or as a part of the main task useful.

Learnings

  1. All users found it difficult to differentiate between subtasks and the actual tasks on the board.
  2. All users felt that the subtask list within the main task looked too similar to a checklist and did not convey the hierarchy of tasks.
  3. Three out of four users could not find the option to hide the subtask list on the board. They expected to find it near the main task instead of in the view setting.
Design Changes

Main task card

  • Updated the subtask list to have a different appearance from the checklist.
  • Ability to collapse/expand subtask list from within the task.

Subtask card

Change the appearance of a subtask to be differentiated from the main task.

View settings

Grouped the settings options, as well as the ability to show/hide items to display on a task.

Results
Data for January 2021 to December 2021
  • There was an average of 3.3 subtasks under a parent task with a median of 2.
  • 95% of parent tasks that contain subtasks have 10 or less subtasks.

Overall

Of all the users who created subtasks, on average they have created 25 subtasks each with a median of 5 subtasks.

1.7%
of all tasks created have subtasks
13%
of workspaces have created subtasks
19%
of users have created subtasks

On a weekly basis

Of all the users who created subtasks, on average they have created 7 subtasks each with a median of 3 subtasks each week.

1.8%
of all tasks created have subtasks
18%
of workspaces have created subtasks
11%
of users have created subtasks

Feature Progression

Since the subtask feature was first introduced in 2021, there has been a consistent increase in the feature usage year over year as seen below.

Learnings

The Subtask project taught me how to prioritize design under time constraints and validate it through usability testing. Testing the design early helped us identify and fix design issues before the implementation phase, saving time and costs.