A few years ago I helped to conduct a needs finding CSAT survey amongst our customers. For years I had been thinking about perceived and anecdotal problems with navigation and organization in the Domo product, and this survey was the perfect opportunity to validate what I had heard directly from customers in interviews and usability tests over the years. We added the questions related to navigation and organization, and the results were very clear. We had a problem. We organized the feedback into several categories and worked to come up with some solutions that could solve for as many as possible.
My team had been working with the mobile engineers to resolve some specific customer requests that ignited an idea that could resolve many of these issues. I collaborated with Jason Longhurst, another design director on a solution that could span all Domo products. And we called it Workspaces. While the concepts around Workspaces aren’t particularly novel to SASS products we knew that it would be a major challenge to make a reality because of how it would touch nearly every engineering team at Domo. So I started the campaign to get as many executives on board with the idea as possible.
There was already interest in improving the merchandising and onboarding within Domo to focus on product-led growth, which would impact the navigation, and so we felt like it would be a great opportunity to couple Workspaces with that initiative. I prepared a presentation with the proposal, including metrics, customer quotes, and so forth, and I must have given the presentation 20 times (sometimes condensed into 2 minutes), to executives or the whole product org. The gist of the message was that we needed to give our customers the ability to organize, prioritize, and personalize their Domo experience, especially for teams. When I heard the CTO reuse that same phrase in a company wide meeting I knew that the message had sunk in, and we were ready to prioritize the project and reallocate the budget and staff to reflect that.
We put together some quick prototypes (which thanks to our Sora Design System spearheaded by myself and Ellen Lingwall took very little time) and started testing with customers. We discovered some things we needed to iterate on, and with over 100 one-on-one customer interviews I conducted and hundreds of unmoderated usability tests and several iterations later over a year and a half had passed and we were ready to show the world. At Domo’s Domopalooza user conference in March of 2025 we officially announced the Workspaces / Navigation / Feature Page feature set, and myself and Aaron Hindes, our lead engineer also hosted a breakout session that was packed with hundreds of users champing at the bit to adopt Workspaces for their company, especially customers with more than 10,000 users. We met with several of these customers after the announcement to help them understand how to best role it out to their orgs.
Here you can see our teaser video, which I also wrote and produced, that was played on stage to 1,500 in-person guests, and thousands more online, just before our SVP of Product Ben Schein announced the details of the feature set. It was pretty rewarding to hear cheering from the crowd for something myself and my team of designers and researchers put so much effort into.