A Chameleon Case Study
We knew from our research that teams with good templates and good design involvement early on went on to become successful customers.
Initial Hypothesis
CSS is hard for some designers to write so lets make that easier.
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Initial idea was to create a better way to target CSS and later on to make writing CSS easier, possibly leveraging an AI co-pilot.
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Started to research and found a more complex problem.
My first idea for Custom CSS, a small improvement to our builder to make targeting easier
Research
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From Customers:
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Key styling functions are ignored because they are inadequate / low trust
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Coding ability is highly variable amongst designers
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Chameleon can be a blocker to rollouts where multiple themes are required
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Specificity is hard to manage
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Customers have problems managing large amounts of Account CSS
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From internal experience:
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A lot of building happens by duplicating experiences causing CSS to 'collect'
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The most successful accounts are when designers come in and set up Templates
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From my own experience redesigning experiences:
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I wasn't confident adding things to account wide CSS since that may affect other experiences and I couldn't confidently test.
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I found myself wanting to 'apply' the style of a template on top of existing experiences.
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Creating templates for every survey type is time consuming.
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Refined Hypothesis:
The writing of CSS isn't the most pressing problem, its the management of existing styles.
Early Designs
- First sketches:
- Early concept of 'Themes':
- Set up continuous discovery around styling to talk to customers, show early designs and refine our understanding of the problem.
The Messy Middle
- Design reviews with the product & design team
A crucial detail
- My face on realising I had missed a crucial property of how templates were being used by customers:
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Two paths were available:
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Radically simplify the concept
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Solve the problem of templates and themes interacting
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Finally, an inspired idea (from our founder during design review) led to a way around the problem of templates and themes interacting together.
The Slipstream
A curious thing happens when the idea feels right, problems arise but so do solutions. Things starts to become obvious. Jason Fried describes this as 'good ideas have a slipstream'.
One of the final screens for our new improved 'Theme Editor'
Chameleon - 2024