Areas
Overview
Background
We created two new ways to show a summary of the redlines that a user made while negotiating a contract. Those new ways were:
Amendments - all redlines would be outlined in a document
Exception Tables - a spreadsheet summary of redlines
Problem
Users wanted groups of redlines to exported together instead of as separate items in an amendment document or exception table.
For example, if a user wanted to delete section 10 the document would show every subsection in section 10 as separate items in the exported Amendment or Exception Table instead of section 10 as a whole was deleted.
Solution
The solution was to create a way for users to select contiguous sections that could be grouped and named in an Amendment or Exception Table. We called this new feature, areas.
Research
Customers reached out to us to provide feedback on Amendments. We had just launched the feature and it had a lot of positive feedback. The major issue with Amendments was that sections could not be grouped when the Amendment was exported. This issue also occurred when we launched Exception Tables. We contacted the customers that left the feedback and discussed the issue and came up with the solution to create areas.
Planning
My initial plan was to add on to the bulk selector feature that already existed in the application. Bulk selector allowed a user to select multiple sections and either delete them or add a comment. The problem with using the bulk selector was that it would be harder to convey to users that the selected sections needed to be adjacent to each other.
The second plan was to have the user set a start and end point for the selection. Everything in between the points would be grouped. This is the design that we went with because it was the most straight forward. Some other questions that came up during the process were if we would allow overlapping areas. We ultimately decided not to allow overlapping areas because a section would not need to be referenced multiple times in an Amendment or Exception Table.
Areas
I designed areas to be accessible through the left pane. This made the most sense because the left pane was designed to help users navigate through a contract. A user could use the areas section to navigate to the various areas that were set by the user.
Because areas was a new concept for users, I added text in the empty state to remind users what areas could be used for. The + button started the process of creating an area.
After the + was clicked, an overflow pane would open. The user would need to set the area and name it before it could be saved. I designed the controls for setting an area to be simple. Once the start point was set, the only option for the user was to set an end point. I added the ability to change the start or end point as well.
Conclusion
User were successful at using areas and it helped them with their Amendment and Exception Table exports. We did run into an issue of users forgetting to set areas before export. This would be addressed in a future project.