A quick look at our new layout and navigation

We made some pretty big improvements to the look and layout of Clubhouse. If you haven’t seen it yet, log on in and take a look. Hopefully you like it! We think you will.

The most notable alteration is to the layout of our in app navigation. We’ve created logical groupings of features along the left hand navigation. There wasn’t necessarily any rhyme or reason behind the way we listed these items out in the past, but now we sort features into how they’re used.

Up in the top left are four that fall under what we call our Work category: Home — which was previously called Dashboard — as well as Stories, Epics, and Milestones.

Beneath these is our Planning category: right now this only includes Iterations, but will also include a feature we’re currently calling Timelines once it’s released from Beta.

And then there's More, which has a lot more. Here you'll find features that allow you to Categorize your work: Projectsand Labels.

As well as Analyze your work: Reports, Status, and Search.

You'll also notice that your Settings and Profile have been moved to the lower left where they are easier to see and therefore a bit easier to access. The navigation in the upper right hand of the page had been getting awfully crowded before and now everything accessed there slides out in a useful shelf, making Learn, Help, Recently Viewed, and Activity that much easier to use.

The left hand navigation also collapses to hide the labels, giving you more room to work.

Our layout and navigation aren’t the only things we changed.  

Our Story Cards are cleaner, modern, and simplified, and we also now show the task counts right in the cards without you needing to open them up.

Why did we make these changes? 

We all remember back in the day when Facebook used to change their layout roughly once a month, causing half the US population to melt down. We’re obviously not looking to recreate this experience.

But we also knew that we needed to make an update. Internally we felt like:

It all came down to this:

How can we introduce new features and extend our product, while also making Clubhouse simpler to use and easier to understand?

It started with research: what were users saying? 

Onboarding and first impressions were generally overwhelming. “Where do I go first… what should I be looking at?”

Navigation customization was helpful since our own default nav wasn’t perfect, but it limited our own ability to grow and ensure our features are even noticed, and for some engineering leaders there was a real question of “Why do all my teams have a different navigation?”

The Story Cards were already solid, but needed some extra content (tasks), some restructuring, and styling improvements for better contrast and readability.

And visually, Clubhouse was starting to look a little dated. These are the 2020s!

People are going places! The world is like the Jetsons! Uh, wait a sec...

Then we looked at the data: what were users doing? 

We reviewed our key workflows, and the features that all you folks were using the most. Here’s some of what we found:

Then what we’d do? 

Even with this info in hand, we didn’t yet want to set in stone exactly what we’d change. So we dug into some design exercises and explored a ton of variations in search of the best possible approach. We went between designs that were just small tweaks vs others that would have had some notably big learning curves.

After all this we determined that we didn’t want to just go out and change everything. Instead, we took this as a chance to make the UX more streamlined as part of our longer term strategy of adding more useful features for customers to use over time.

We decided not to mess with any of the absolute essentials (like the Create button and search), and instead focus on the areas noted above where we felt like were not quite where needed to be.

As good Clubhouse users we started planning our iterations, then finalized our designs and got to building. We released our changes internally for a few weeks to make sure everything was stable and then we started getting customers involved.

That process looked like this:

Early beta testing

We rolled things out to users who expressed interest in test driving it. We saw a great percentage of opt-in and stickiness early on.

We then surveyed users to see how they’d rate the initial changes. They rated them pretty highly.

A couple of big items popped up and they were an issue with our original new story colors and problems with background contrast.

We fixed that and continued to expand the number of users testing it and saw a continued increase in stickiness.

And then we A/B tested with newly signed up users, to ensure we saw better results with the new layout than with the old.

That brings us here! To the launch day.

The look and feel of Clubhouse will always be a continual work in progress. We’ll be tweaking and making it better it until Clubhouse is no longer a company, which the prophecies have said will not happen until January 17, 3522. So that’s a lot of years ahead of us to continue building an even better product.

Thanks to everyone who tried this out and gave us feedback. The usability of Clubhouse is better because of you!

And if you’ve never used Clubhouse before? Well, there’s no time like the present.