Favorite App Design: Google Docs
The other day, I had to answer two questions about my favorite product design.
Present an app you consider extremely well-designed. What would be 3 promising features to improve it even more?
I am a big fan of Google Docs. I made writing and note-taking a personal habit that helps me to structure my thoughts and to evaluate my thinking. I like the product for 3 reasons in particular:
- 1st) Reliablity – my thoughts and ideas never get lost. I can always rely on GDocs that the documents I create are saved in the cloud or will be synchronized whenever I have an internet connection again. Further, I can access the latest version of my documents from anywhere and at any time as I have apps for every client.
- 2nd) Versatility – I can create documents for basically anything. At Lounging Bear, we had a Minutes document, where we would successively add our notes and decisions from our biweekly standups. For junto, I wrote PRDs in GDocs to discuss trade-offs and the product roadmap. Personally, I am keeping a journal in GDocs for decision making (e.g., career choices). To write down what I expect and what my concerns are for every decision that I take.
- 3rd) Collaboration – I can always discuss and get feedback on my ideas. I love that with GDocs, you can easily share your documents with a link. Moreover, this link will always point to the most recent version. Whoever you share your document with can leave comments, make suggestions, and become a collaborator.
I still think that there is room for improvement. In the following, I am going to list 3 potential improvements that would improve the user experience of Google Docs for me:
- 1st) Consistency – Formatting becomes inconsistent and hard to change. Whenever you want to change the way you format a headline (in a document with multiple headlines), you can never be sure that every headline follows this change. This issue is mostly due to the WYSIWYG nature of Gdocs. My solution to this would be to have an unformatted document mode, where instead of a WYSIWYG editor, you can use a markup language such as MarkDown. Through this, you would ensure that formatting is more consistent throughout a big document.
- 2nd) Publishing – Share your thoughts in a more personalized way. I like to write blog posts in GDocs, although GDocs has a publishing feature, it does not support the technology of my website. Google could help bloggers by having better integrations for their blogging software. For example, GDocs could support pushing posts directly to your Wordpress solution or make GDocs a headless Content Management System for static websites.
- 3rd) References – GDocs does not support scientific referencing. When I was working on scientific papers with other authors, I was looking for ways to manage my references within GDocs. Although there are 3rd party solutions for this, none of those supported collaborating on a reference library. I think GDocs could offer a solution to manage a bibliography for documents, where collaborators could add or change citations and the reference list.
Which idea would you implement first and why? How would you measure success?
I would focus on a solution for scientific referencing within Google Docs. I think aside from the user experience point of view this would also add benefit towards acquiring new users from the scientific community, and it would help authors of documents to better integrate scientific research in their documents. On the other hand, there are two things in particular that I would weigh against this feature:
- 1st) This is probably a feature that is not addressing a lot of users as there are only a small number of potential users that would use GDocs to create scientific papers. Though, Google could market this feature for their GSuite (GSuite is a B2B subscription for multiple Google cloud products) offering, as a lot of companies are conducting research internally. They could advertise it to these companies as a way to grow and manage their own scientific library through GDocs. Where cross referencing previous papers from the company would become a lot easier.
- 2nd) This is not a trivial feature to implement as you would have to build a component that would allow you to manage your bibliography. For this, GDocs might have an advantage by directly integrating and linking documents from Google Scholar, which would help researchers a lot as they would not have to manage citations by themself anymore.
Measuring success of this feature would be determined predominantly by its usage (sessions where references were used). Google’s B2C business model is driven by user engagement, as they are offering their services for free to earn money through performance and awareness advertising. Hence, every product in Google’s B2C line up is focused on increasing user engagement as the company’s profit is depending on how much time users spend with Google services. Although GDocs is not advertising, it is a gateway product for Google’s GDrive cloud services and thereby increases users’ ad exposure indirectly. Another way of measuring success, would be through measuring the engagement of GSuite users in particular. Here you could also just look at the portion of documents that use references, which belong to a GSuite company to determine the importance for GSuite users.