Google Docs is a web-based word processor that allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating with other users in real-time. I frequently use it, both for collaboration purposes and individual purposes. I like that Google Docs is free, accessible through all of my devices, and easy to use, at least for the basic necessity to process general text editing. Meanwhile, for creating documents that need special formatting, I sometimes experience some difficulties and find myself end up looking for tutorials on the internet. This makes me think, “Do other people also experience difficulties while using Google Docs? What kind of difficulties it would be?” I want to know more so I can improve the document editing experience in Google Docs.

The image below encapsulates the entire process of this project.

When using Google Docs, I mostly struggle with finding certain features, such as how to insert a shape in Google Docs, how to insert math symbols to my document, or how to see the word counts on my document. To know if other people also have difficulties in using Google Docs, I conduct desk research through customer reviews and user interviews.

To have the base of user pain points towards Google Docs and what I want to dig more in user interviews, I searched for Google Docs’ customer reviews on g2.com and capterra.com. I grouped the findings into several categories below:

I want to understand more about user likes and dislikes, their behavior and reason for using Google Docs, and how is their overall experience in using Google Docs. I interviewed 5 participants who frequently use Google Docs and grouped the interview findings to ease the data analysis.

Some key insights that I use as a reference for solution ideation:

I want to find out what are the strengths and weaknesses of Google Docs’ competitors and identify any gaps in features that Google Docs might address. Other than that, doing competitor analysis also helps me with the solution ideation later on.

I compare Google Docs to Ms. Word online since there are many people who mentioned it on the desk research and user interviews and to Zoho Writer since it is an interesting web-based word processor which I never heard of before but I find it easy to use and have extensive features.

From the customer reviews and user interviews, I conclude the pain points that most users are troubled with (I neglect the technical problem like formatting struggle).  I generate How Might We questions from the pain points to help me generate creative solutions in the next process while focusing on the problems that I want to solve.

I brainstormed the possible solutions for each How Might We question and finally arrived at the results below. The ideas of the solution came from observing various apps (the competitor analysis before, other apps that I enjoyed using, and the app that was mentioned during the user interviews), referring to the key insights I gathered during the user interviews, as well as from reading some articles related to the problem I want to solve. After considering the pros and cons of each idea, I got to decide which to implement and which to archive.

I finally started to implement the solutions to high-fidelity design. You can click this link to interact directly with the design.

At the end of the project, what I feel and what I found are that...