Custom Fields

custom fields

configurable fieldsets

When I joined as the lead UX designer, the core experience had been designed and built but not implemented on many tools at Procore.

My main focus was implementing fieldsets and custom fields across multiple tools. I also contributed to defining the team's vision and roadmap, designed visual updates, added new field types, and implemented new features.

My role

When I joined the team, we were at a crossroads regarding what to work on next. I led a half-day workshop with the engineers and product manager to brainstorm and prioritize our tasks. This helped us clarify our main priority, identify additional features to work on, and allowed me to gain knowledge of the product and build rapport with the team.

We identified our key users, brainstormed ideas to improve the product, and prioritized them, which was especially helpful for me as a new team member. These prioritized ideas then formed the foundation for our roadmap for the duration of my time on the team.

Defining vision & roadmap

Soon after joining the team, I discovered that another team in the company had developed something similar to fieldsets but with a different visual treatment. One of my first orders of business was befriending the designers on this other team and learning about what they had been doing.

Although it wasn’t ideal that they had built a separate but similar solution, I agreed that their UX improved on what we had, since it was clearer that you were turning fields off and on. I worked with both teams to make adjustments and implement their designs using shared frontend code, providing our users with a more consistent and clear experience.

Visual Updates

On the custom fields front, one of our top priorities was to add more field types. We supported a few basic types like checkbox, text input, and single select dropdown, but wanted to add in all the possible fields that were in the rest of the product

Our engineering team had named the initial field types using the technical terms such as “true/false” (instead of checkbox) and “decimal” (for number).

Additionally, there were some Procore-specific fields like “multi person selector”, “directory person selector”, and “single person selector” — names that were so confusing that nobody on the team could keep them straight. It became clear to me that we could not surface these technical and confusing names to our users.

I worked with our team’s content strategist to first figure out what each field was, find examples of that field across web and mobile, and ultimately come up with a list of names that were clear to everyone.

Field types

Last but certainly not least, rolling out fieldsets and custom fields to more tools in Procore was one of the company’s top objectives while I was on the team. While most of the rollout legwork was an engineering effort, I helped to standardize how we announced releases in the product, built relationships across teams, and helped answer and address any UX questions & concerns as we engaged with new teams.

Rollout

Over almost two years I was part of this team, we rolled out fieldsets to 20 tools and custom fields to over 16. Customer use of this functionality continues to grow; in the second half of 2020 our goal was to have 23% of customers using fieldsets on 3 or more tools, and we exceeded that goal with over 30% of customers using fieldsets.

Outcomes