Sharing
About SafetyCulture
SafetyCulture is a workplace operations platform that helps businesses improve safety, quality, efficiency, and compliance.
The platform provides templates that are fully-customisable that allow businesses to cater to specific operational processes, safety requirements, or regulatory obligations.
The problem
Customers find sharing templates to others a difficult process. Upon further exploration, the sharing functionality throughout the SafetyCulture platform was implemented inconsistently, contributing to a disjointed experience across all areas.
My role
This was a project I undertook along with a lead product designer while I was in the Design Systems space at SafetyCulture.
My goal was to:
Make it easier for customers to share templates
Establish a consistent sharing pattern that could scale across multiple product areas, and not just templates
Redesign
Before
Template sharing experience
Sharing a chart
Sharing a "Heads Up"
The process
Customers were telling us that it’s hard to share templates. The problem seems straightforward, but it still lacks a clear reason as to why they find this process difficult.
I started with these initial questions to help clarify the problem space:
What do people mean by sharing a template?
Why do people want to share templates?
Who is doing the sharing - administrators, team leads, managers, frontline workers?
How are they currently sharing, and what makes this task difficult?
How do I validate that the experience is improved? What metrics could I use to measure success?
To get early clarify, I used low-cost, fast turnaround research methods:
Heuristic evaluation
Customer feedback
Findings
Inconsistent terminology
Inconsistent terminology was a major barrier. Across the product, we used different labels like “Export” or “Manage Access” to represent the act of sharing, creating confusion about what each action actually did
Low task-completion rate
Only 1/5 participants in guerrilla testing were able to complete the given task. The main friction point experienced by the unsuccessful participants was that they could not locate/understand where the actual “Share” CTA was
"Manage access" is a confusing term
Customer feedback forms revealed similar sentiment, where they consistently misunderstood the “Manage access” term and failed to make the connection that this was how to share a template
These insights helped me go from an ambiguous problem statement (”sharing a template is hard”), to a more specific and importantly actionable problem statement:
The terminology used (”Manage access”) in our product is unclear, and is preventing customers from successfully sharing templates.
At this point, an initial option was to simply rename “Manage access” to “Share”. While this could’ve addressed the language problem, I wanted to understand the implications of this.
What does "Manage access" do?
How it works, is that when someone has access to a template, they also have different levels of access on that template i.e. some can view only, some can edit and view, and more importantly some can conduct inspections using that template.
The complexity comes in when customers want to control the flow of the inspection results. For example, let’s say Serena is a frontline worker at the Sydney branch. As she conducts inspections on that template, the organisation may want to control where those results should go to by making the results available to only the team at Sydney.
However, this template is also relevant to Bob who works at the Brisbane branch. The organisation also only wants the results of Bob’s inspections to go to the staff at Brisbane.
I wanted to then understand who was using this existing “Manage access” screen.
More specifically, were they using this screen to perform a simple share action, or were they using the full access control feature?
Findings
Using Hotjar, I was able to see how our customers interacted with the “Manage access” screen. More importantly, I was able to observe the actual logic they have set up, and I was able to get further details such as the size of the organisation.
Company with around 500 users
Company with around 200 users
Company with around 100 users
Company with around 700 users
Company with 3 users
Company with 20 seats
Adoption of custom inspection rules is limited
Around half of the sampled users don’t have the logic set up to customise where inspection results go to.
Larger organisations warrant more complexity
The users that do have inspection results logic set up tend to be larger organisations with more users on the platform.
Smaller orgs keep it simple
Essentially, smaller orgs have simpler access rules, and larger orgs tend to have more complex access rules.
From this, I hypothesised the following:
The current “Manage access” screen caters for the complexity of larger organisations who want to set up complicated access rules. However, having this as the only way for people to share templates is hindering majority of users the ability to share a template as they are intimidated by its complexity.
The redesign
The redesign was grounded in the principle that I wanted to support both a “Share template” option alongside the existing “Manage access” option. The approach helps to balance simplicity for customers with a simple sharing need, while still supporting the requirements of power users in larger organisations.
For design inspiration, I looked at competitors that our customers are likely to use, and other products too to see what general patterns for sharing are.
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.” - Jakob’s Law
Some common elements from other products for sharing:
explicit “Share” CTA
modal pattern on web for selecting which users to share to
allow users to also adjust access levels once item is shared
Using these points of inspiration I designed how this could look for sharing templates:
Surfaced a more explicit "Share template" button on the overflow menu
Used a modal pattern for sharing a template
Another note to point out is that I still kept the “Manage access” option on the overflow menu on a template. The reasoning behind this is so users that do want to set up more complicated access rules can still do so. I’ve also ensured to have this option in the simplified share modal.
The next problem
After the proposed sharing redesign experience for templates, the next challenge was ensuring that the new Share modal could be scaled and used across the entire platform for other features such as Actions, Analytics, Issues and more.
I conducted an audit of sharing functionality across the platform, and observed that each product area supported different sharing behaviours and capabilities.
Table of supported sharing functionality across different product areas
Some discrepancies included:
Internal vs external sharing
Some areas allowed only internal users, while others supported sharing to people outside the organisation
Generating share links
In some cases, a public link could be created. In others, link-sharing wasn't supported at all
Adjusting access levels
Certain items had granular permission settings (e.g., view, edit, manage), while others had all-or-nothing access
Validation
To determine if the redesign meaningfully improves the sharing experience, I planned to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative validation methods:
Prototype Testing
I would use a clickable prototype to simulate the new sharing flow and test it with users. This helps uncover usability issues early, particularly whether users can locate and use the new “Share” option. I’d also run quick internal testing to rapidly gather feedback
A/B Testing
To quantify the impact, I’d run an experiment comparing the new share experience with the existing “Manage Access” flow. Key metrics to track could include completion rates, number of times “Share” was clicked
Completion funnels
Using tools like Amplitude, I would map the steps users take to share a template and analyse where they drop off
Launch the new experience
Since the existing “Manage Access” option remained untouched, the risk of introducing the new share modal was relatively low. I wasn’t disrupting any established patterns, and proposed to just add a simpler alternative. Because of this, I leaned towards releasing the new modal to all users rather than running a limited beta. Post-launch, I planned to closely monitor user feedback and usage data to identify opportunities for iteration and improvement.
