How can Google Docs be improved?

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How can Google Docs be improved?

Asked at Google over a year ago

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Product Design category

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syadav2 · Answer 1 · 2019-06-17T02:19:46+0000

Clarifying questions:

Google doc is a multiplatform software including Web, Mobile(Andriod and IOS). Since Web application is widely used and most popular among all. Hence, I will be analyzing this only.

First I am going to talk about Google Docs functionality, then I am gonna talk about the underlying motivation of it and then I am gonna find who are the users of google docs. After that, I will explore the use cases and then I will be using those use cases to find unmet needs in the current product.

Google doc is used to share the documents across multiple users and it has allowed real-time collaboration among the teams by creating, editing and viewing the documents.

Underlying motivation

To make the same digital document available to several people at the same time irrespective of their locations.

Users:

It could be used by students
It could be used by small startups
It could be used by big corporates
It could be used by teachers

Students are not the frequent users of google doc they only need at the time of exams or some special submission and same goes with teachers. Hence, I have shortlisted small startups and big corporates are the primary users of Google doc.

Use Cases:

Read time editing: Multiple users want to edit a shared document and all expect to see each other changes real time for better collaboration.
Adding the pictures in all available formats.
Use tables and other structures to add mathematical data.
Screenshot sharing, suppose I wanna highlighted and take a screenshot without using snipping tool in a real-time
Auto edit of texts with grammatical and vocabulary suggestions.
Chat messenger to get instant answers with the peers

What issues would not be solved by the current product?

Real-time edition is being available and teams have been using it Adding pictures feature is still not present and it is one of the important needs for the users because in every document users want to add few pictures to increase readability and presentability.

Table option is still available but it not as robust as it expected. Auto spelling correct is there but it has a lot of issues in adding suggested values.Comment option has present but its not fulfilling a need to get instant answers.

Prioritized problems:

On the basis of impact and business value I have shortlisted the problems below:

Adding pictures in all formats
Spelling and grammatical suggestions
Instant chat

Solutions

Pictures could be added from multiple sources like it should allow creating users their own library, it could have a shared library and could be categorized in multiple ways. For example, If I am working on financial reports I could use a high-quality picture which already been shared and used by other people that would add significant value in my report and make reports more readable.The impact is high and efforts(engineering time) are high.
Spelling and grammatical suggestion could be provided by underlying the current spelling and would make to replace my suggestion in a single click.The impact is high and efforts are medium.
I would develop a chatbot which will provide real-time notification with the help google doc app.The impact is medium and efforts are high
According to the impact and efforts analysis, I would like to choose the second feature to be added for improvement of google docs.