A web app that works as a read-only user interface for online spreadsheets.
The app accesses the sheet through the APIs, interprets each row as an item of a list, and finally showcases it with a user-friendly interface.
Visit it on Github.
The Challenges.
- No similar products on the market. Privacy regulations were a new thing, and existing preference centers were not built with them in mind.
- Personas having divergent needs: the Chief Privacy Officer, the Data Monetisation Officer and the Marketing team.
- The absence of a legal department. Researching the legal constraints posed by the privacy regulations was an additional effort along all the process.
The project.
This is a personal open source project, we are currently a team of two.
I’m taking care of the whole product design and product discovery. I’m also defining the roadmap and managing the backlog.
The product idea is based on the fact that spreadsheets are largely used to keep track of any kind of personal things. And while everyone organizes them differently, we can abstract them as a series of items with few attached properties.
As example, in these screenshots I’m considering the case of a spreadsheet containing a board game inventory. Each of the games comes with single properties (e.g. the rating), and arrays (e.g. gallery of images).
The app allows all of this information to be rendered with a design that is easy to read and navigate. Each game is listed vertically as a card that the user can expand, sort, search, filter, and bookmark.
The application doesn’t require any admin interface. It can fetch the data from the spreadsheet and visualize the content just by inserting the spreadsheet link in an input field. And after that, the list can be shared with everyone. No login is required, neither for the user creating the list nor for the ones visiting it.
Manipulating the list.
The users can access the sorting settings from the main menu and choose a criterion from all the available properties.
The menu also offers the option to display the tags (in orange) in the main view. This is up to the user because in case of a great number of tags the main view could become too crowded of information and reduce the readability.
Expanding the cards.
By tapping on the eye icon from the main menu, the users can enter the “details” mode and see all the properties attached to the items, images included.
Filtering the list.
The filters, fundamental to exploring the list, are accessible with the first icon from the main menu.
The filters panel allows filtering through all the numerical properties of the items.
On the other hand, the search field in the header allows searching the tags and other text-based properties.
Bookmarking
The users can add items to their favourites ⭐️ thanks to the local storage and without having to create an account.
They can also see which items are favourites by the list owner by looking for the 👑 icon on the card, just above the images.
