Product UX

Designing file discovery around how people actually remember

On a team collaboration app, every shared file eventually vanished into the chat thread it was posted in. I rebuilt discovery around the file itself — so a document stays findable no matter which conversation it started in.

Role: Lead Product Designer — end-to-end UX
Timeframe: 2022–2023
Context: MelpApp · a team collaboration platform (messaging, calls, workspace)

+32%User engagementAfter the file workspace shipped

+16%User retentionSustained over the following quarters

Every team that used MelpApp had the same quiet ritual: scroll up. Someone shared a file last week, the conversation moved on, and now finding it means combing back through hundreds of messages — or just asking them to send it again.

MelpApp combined messaging, calls, and workspace chat. Files rode along inside conversations, which felt natural until a thread got long. Then the document you needed was somewhere in there, unsearchable, often re-uploaded two or three times by people who couldn't find the original. The product had quietly become an archive of files without ever becoming a system for managing them.

When the chat becomes a filing cabinet

The behaviour was everywhere once I looked for it. People didn't lose files because the app lacked a feature — they lost them because the app's only model for a file was "a thing that happened in a conversation."

What people kept telling us

I interviewed teams who lived in MelpApp daily — designers, engineers, managers. The pattern was consistent, and a little obvious in hindsight.

Nobody remembered which chat a file was in. They remembered the file.

Once a document had been shared, people expected to find it on its own terms — by what it was, who sent it, when — not by reconstructing the conversation it came from. That single observation moved the problem from "improve message history" to "give files a home of their own."

We weren't fixing search inside chat. We were giving files a place to exist.

The decision: a workspace, not a folder

The easy answer was a conventional file explorer bolted onto the side. I didn't want that — a separate folder tree would just split people's attention between "where I talk" and "where my files live." The harder, better answer was a workspace that connected the two, so a file kept its conversation context and gained a life beyond it.

Information architecture diagram showing every file stored in two complementary ways: by conversation and by workspace folders. — Every file lives in two places at once: by conversation — the thread it came from, context intact — and by workspace, in folders, for people who organise. One canonical file, two mental models, no duplication.

This dual model became the spine of the product. Files grouped by conversation preserved the why; the same files in a structured workspace served the people who think in folders. Nobody had to choose, and nothing was stored twice.

Designing the rest around how people look

With the model settled, the features mostly designed themselves — each one answering a specific way people had been failing to find things.

Before

Scroll the thread, or ask a teammate to re-send
The same file uploaded two or three times
Search that only matched the exact filename

After

Open the workspace, filter, done
One canonical file, shared by reference with a click
Search across type, people, team, date and context

A personal workspace let people upload and organise without posting into a chat, then drop a file into any conversation by reference — killing most of the duplicate uploads. Permissions gave files owners: view, comment, download or edit, so shared documents stopped changing under people. And search stopped being an afterthought.

Two mobile screens: sharing a workspace file into a conversation with a 'send as reference — no duplicate upload' toggle, and the file appearing inside the chat as a reference card rather than a re-uploaded copy. — A file in your personal workspace drops into any conversation as a reference — one canonical copy, shared with a tap. The chat gets the file; the system never makes a second one.

Two mobile screens: the File Hub listing every shared file with type icons, source conversation and owner across All files / By conversation / Workspace tabs; and a File Details screen with metadata and owner-controlled permissions (Owner, Can edit, Can comment). — One place for everything a team had ever shared — so retrieval stopped depending on remembering where a file had been posted. Tap any file to see where it came from, who can touch it, and what they're allowed to do.

Two mobile screens: a multi-filter search sheet (file type, shared by, team, date, conversation) and the filtered results that match the deck Priya shared with the design team this month. — The filters mirror how people describe a file out loud — 'the deck Priya shared with the design team last month' — instead of forcing an exact name.

What changed

Giving files a home of their own changed how — and how often — teams used the product.

+32%User engagementMeasured after the file workspace shipped to teams.

+16%User retentionHeld over the following quarters as the workspace became habit.

The numbers tracked something simpler underneath: people stopped losing their own work, and a collaboration tool started feeling like one.

What I took from it

The instinct was to make message history smarter. The unlock was to stop treating files as a side effect of conversation and start treating them as first-class objects with their own home.

It taught me to design for the mental model, not the data model. People had told us, plainly, that they thought in files — the product just hadn't been listening. Most of the work after that was getting out of their way.