In this article, Casper Smith, UI Architect for mtribes, talks about conflict handling, great UX and FIRE projects.

What is conflict resolution or handling?

Today’s digital environments often require collaborative working. But co-editing content can also lead to conflicts, as one person’s edits cause another to lose their work. Super frustrating at best, and business destroying at worst. This might sound dramatic, but bad user experience can lead to customers seeking out other products or tools.

One way to minimize this risk is to implement intuitive conflict handling in your user interface.

How has mtribes approached conflict resolution?

We spoke with Casper Smith, UI Architect at mtribes about the solution he initiated to resolve co-editing conflicts.

User experience is everything

Familiar with the negative consequences of editing collisions, and unsatisfied with inefficiency, Casper wanted an elegant and intuitive solution for mtribes.

Casper describes how improved conflict handling would enable our users to “...make changes throughout the site with confidence and collaborate more effectively with other members of their team”.

mtribes is a relatively new product, so developing a solution to conflict handling could have incurred substantial technical challenges. Casper took it on himself to develop a solution in a dedicated creative session we call FIRE.

Casper prioritised making your teammates actions more discoverable and communicating the impact of your actions in his approach to collaborative working.

Good UX empowers your audience

To be more aware of where your co-workers are working within your digital spaces, we’ve added timestamps and implemented a real-time display of any team members concurrently viewing a page.

Casper shares how this avoids potential conflict: “...visibility gives them a sort of ‘heads up’ that other users might be making changes”.

To better communicate the consequences of your actions we’ve added a dynamic status indicator, and introduced clear messaging that explains what to expect when you refresh or dismiss an edit.

Casper suggests that this is likely to lead to better collaborative experiences. He says, “Users will be notified in real-time so that they can pre-emptively avoid conflicts, and opt into getting up to date with the latest changes”.

This solution will improve our user experience, and ultimately strengthen the relationship between you (our customers) and our platform.

Where's the FIRE?

One of the ways mtribes encourages creativity and innovation amongst our developers is through dedicating time for them to work on projects that they themselves create. In Casper's words,

“FIRE is an opportunity for developers to explore new technologies or creative ideas that interest them, with potential to return a direct value to our product”.

In this FIRE project, Casper extended his skillset to include web-sockets and GraphQL subscriptions, and in doing so brought real-time changes to mtribes that improve our user experience. Casper puts it better than we could,

“Fire projects spark innovation and ignite growth within our team”.

It’s encouraging creativity within our platform that led to mtribes being awarded silver ‘Innovation of the year’ 2020.