Following contracts in SpotDraft
Released in Q1 2026
Duration: 2 months
Context
Objectives
To let users follow contracts that they are involved in directly on SpotDraft's homepage and repository.
Problem Statement
Users were not seeing the contracts they wanted in the contract widget on home. How might we help users track that contracts that they are involved in?
Insight
Users did not see relevant contracts all the time on the homepage. They would only see contract that they were creators or editors for.
Some (34%) power would open CMD + K and 30% of those would search for the contracts they wanted.
"These contracts that they search should ideally be in the homepage itself"
Users land on homepage and open CMD+K search to look for their contract. Contract widget was not helping the users at all.
Solution
Make users follow contracts automatically when they are assigned a task in the contract or when they partake in any activity on the contract.
Also let users follow and unfollow a contract voluntarily.
Show the top 10, last updated, following contracts on the homepage. Show the last activity and any pending task along.
Add a view on repository where they can see all the contracts that they are following from across the workspace.
Design Details
Why the name "Followers"?
Other words like watchers and subscribers used for a similar system didn’t sit well with the use case we were going for. In a day to day work lingo “following” a contract seemed more fitting than "watching" or "subscribing" to a contract.
Simplifying the contract widget in homepage
Removed the tabs and time filter from contract widget. Instead showed top 10 last updated contracts that users are following. The philosophy to keep homepage simple and less customisable was a conscious choice. If users wanted customisations and advanced filtering they can use the repository.
For an advanced filtering and viewing, use repository
Homepage was more focused, a dedicated view for all the followed contracts in repository gave users all the flexibility to the filter, search and build reports.
Dynamic copy
Based on each event that triggers following of a contract, I designed a customised message to show the reason for following a contract.
Impact
We gradually released the following to customers and saw a good spike up for clicks on contracts in the contract widget. The chart shows the release cycle and how "contract followers" got adopted.
+25%
Spike for clicks on contracts after "contract following" was released.