QuillBot: Gmail extensions success
Executive Summary
QuillBot's integration into Gmail, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word transformed from a challenging launch to becoming one of Google's top productivity tools in 2023. What started as a rushed rollout with a rigid waterfall development approach evolved into a success story through agile transformation, iterative design, and a strategic three-phase approach.
The three-phase approach, which included designing core features, grammar correction, AI sentence suggestions, and Quick Reply, streamlined the user's writing experience, leading to a 4.4-star rating and 3 million users. Key improvements, such as visible style-selection icons, significantly boosted engagement and retention. Despite technical challenges, strategic refinements ensured a more intuitive experience, reinforcing QuillBot’s competitive position.
This project underscored the power of cross-functional collaboration, rigorous testing, and breaking complex tasks into manageable components. While adoption has been strong, usage trends align closely with academic cycles. Moving forward, targeted UX research and feature development will be critical in expanding daily use cases and sustaining long-term growth.
Overview
The project aimed to integrate a paraphrasing feature into Gmail, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word, allowing users to select various modes to find the right style and tone for their writing. Users can access 2 modes for free or upgrade to use all 10 modes. Initially, the adoption of this feature struggled due to a poor user experience and a rushed release without internal testing. To address these issues, we replaced the waterfall development process with an agile approach, breaking large projects into smaller, manageable tasks. This transition significantly improved project delivery and quality, resulting in Google choosing the QuillBot extension as one of it's 2023 favorites.
Responsibilities
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Designed the original modes for Gmail
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Oversaw 1 manager and 1 IC
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Collaborated with PM to chunk epics into smaller projects
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Drove execution
Impact
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Steady increase in user adoption
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4.4 star rating on Google Chrome
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3mm downloads
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Recognized by Chrome as a top productivity app
Challenges
Initial poor user experience and below-expected adoption rates threatened the project's viability. The waterfall product development approach limited velocity.
Solution
A strategic three-phase approach built out the grammar correction, AI sentence suggestions, and Quick Reply that streamlined the writing experience through continuous iteration and user feedback.
Results
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4.4-star rating on Chrome Web Store
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3 million active users
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Recognition as Google's top productivity app of 2023
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Significant engagement boost from design improvements
Phases
Phase 1: Grammar correction
The grammar correction cards were kept similar to Grammarly and Wordtune for a sense of immediate intuitiveness, enabling users to jump right in, eliminating all learning hurdles, and accelerate adoption.
Design complexity came with mapping the different grammar errors and reproducing the same errors in the Google Doc's sidebar, which is also part of extensions—not a focus in this case study.
Grammarly
QuillBot
Phase 2: AI sentence suggestions
Users sought various text styles, from formal to creative to simple modes. Premium subscribers appreciated the ability to switch between these styles. However, access to the modes required a click to view and select-too many clicks. Adoption was below expectations, and we ended up adding icons to the sentence suggestions panel. The improvement significantly increased modes' visibility, use, and retention. The addition of the icons was "the" contributing factor to why Google chose QuillBot as a top productivity app. The icons simply made selecting the right mode for the sentence suggestions intuitive.
This is the original modes and sentence suggestions experience I designed in 2022.
This is the latest modes and sentence suggestion design my team from 2023-2024.
Phase 3: Quick reply
Our AI-powered sentence suggestions were developed within a 30-day window, using lean and agile design principles, replacing waterfall as our initial product development approach. Iterative UI enhancements, supported by weekly critiques and asynchronous squad reviews, improved the visibility of paraphrase modes. These enhancements were made possible by QuillBot's advanced AI language models. Subsequently, we integrated ChatGPT to provide quick reply email responses. Quick reply appears when a message is responded to. A grammar checker card also appears to aid in grammar correction.
While integrating the Quick Reply feature, we encountered technical limitations that hindered full automation and required users to enter prompts to generate the replies, whereas Grammarly’s prompt feature is fully automated. Additional tech issues plagued Quick Reply by it overlapping text (below), feedback was unpleasant.
Despite our best efforts to resolve the overlap issues, we couldn't prevent it from interfering with the text. Ultimately, we decided to move the Quick Reply option under the AI button.
Outcome
Getting our engineers and designers in sync paid off big. We hit a 4.4-star rating, grew to 3 million users, and Chrome named us one of their top productivity tools for 2023.
The whole thing came down to being committed to getting it right. We kept tweaking and rebuilding until we had something that made people go "Oh, this is useful" instead of just another browser extension they'd forget about. The goal was always to build something people would reach for every day to make their writing more polished, professional and impactful.
Reflection
This project underscored the power of meticulous planning over rushed rollouts. Iterative design methods and cross-functional collaborations emerged as our winning formula. Future projects will incorporate more testing, better UI enhancements, and breaking big tasks into manageable projects.
Premium conversion rates on QuillBot.com correlate with the academic calendar, peaking at the start of the school year and dipping during summer breaks and holidays (chart). Similar usage patterns are observed with extensions. Moving ahead, conducting UX research becomes imperative to understand how extensions integrate into users' daily routines. Deeper understanding of how QuillBot retains daily relevance is an area for discovery.
Leadership principles
Design Intrapreneur
Advocated for continuous iteration, fostered cross-functional collaboration, and promoted user-centric design, driving innovation and excellence despite setbacks and failures.
Design visionary
Pioneering the design strategy, I originated the extensions and ensured our product surpassed competitors with a customer-centric approach driven by our powerful AI-engine.
Strategic Unifier
Collaborated with product management and engineering leaders to transition from waterfall to agile product development, fostering broad ideation and improving outcomes to meet OKR expectations.