Highspot App Offline Content

Highspot is a sales enablement platform used by sales teams to better manage their sales strategies. Highspot offers a native app experience that allows the flexibility to perform tasks on the go. One of it's main use cases is accessing content offline. I worked closely in a small team with a project manager and a team of 5 - 6 engineers over a year to figure out how we could improve the Offline Content experience. This project was closely associated with the Highspot App Refresh project.

Situation

Offline Content was a feature in the native mobile app experience that suffered a lot of issues during it's first initial release. It was a notable topic in a mobile exploratory research study led by one of our user researchers for our Highspot App Refresh project. Feedback on issues included:

Confusing to access.
No browse or search capabilities.

Accessing Offline Content

When it came to accessing Offline Content, users had to tap on a button that hovered over the bottom navigation. It posed a discoverability issue and also overlaped content on the page. It was very different from the standard navigation patterns for other areas of the app.

Access Offline Content

Old Offline Content Experience

No Browse or Search Capabilities

The Offline Content section looked very different from the rest of the app. The biggest issue was it didn't have access to the bottom navigation and no opportunity to search or filter content. Content is typically organized into groups called 'Spots' and within these Spots, content could be organized into lists within the Spot to improve browsing capabilities. This functionality was not available in Offline Content which made finding particular content challenging.

Old Standard Content List View

Old Offline Content Experience

Tasks

I started off with a competitive analysis of offline experiences in other mobile apps. I looked at Google, Dropbox, Netflix and Spotify to investigate common patterns for handling offline content.

I worked closely with the product manager and lead engineer to define the scope that would be a part of the Highspot App Refresh project. Our top priorities for the GA release were the following:

Improve discoverability
Incorporate search and browsing
Make Offline Content consistent with the rest of the app experience

Action

Offline content was a large consideration when designing layouts for the mobile app redesign. We focused on how it could utilized established page patterns and where it could be accessed.

Navigation

We were able to remove the hovering button for Offline Content and move it into the left side navigation. This change solved the issue of the button that overlapped page content and followed a more standard pattern for accessing features in the mobile app.

Participants in our Alpha and Beta release for the updated app experience gave feedback that Offline Content was now easier to find.

Left side navigation

Page Layout Consistency

We were able to make the Offline Content page more consistent with other content views within Highspot. We also made sure the bottom navigation was accessible so users could quickly access other areas of the app from Offline Content. These changes made the app more unified and reduced foreign UX patterns.

New Offline Content View

New Standard Content List View

Incorporate Search and Browsing

Previously users were not able to search their offline content which was a huge complaint in early user research interviews. We were able to incorporate offline search and provide browsing capabilities. Browsing is accessed from the upper right corner which is a standard pattern in our other content views. Offline content is grouped by the Spots* they were downloaded from. Users can select a Spot to see all the associated content available offline which was another way to find content.

* Spots is a governance term for how content is organized in Highspot.

Browse Offline Content

Offline Content by Spot

Scoped Offline Content Search

Improve Discoverability

We also made sure to improve discoverability through considering scenarios where the user lost network connection. We wanted to provide quick access to offline content through messaging and make sure it was clear that the user was offline while using the app.

Offline Content Messaging

Results

The updated offline content experience was a part of the Highspot App Refresh project and released in September 2021. We have gotten great feedback from customers who have expressed improved reliability of finding content they need for sales opportunities, regardless of network connection.

Takeaways

There are still opportunities to continue improving the offline content experience. One North Star goal is for users to manage their download queue to pause and/or remove content that is taking too long to be available offline. Another goal is to make offline more seamless with the rest of the app experience so that users don't have to rely on accessing a specific area of the app for their offline content. This was a super interesting use case in a larger project to improve the mobile app experience.

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