I chose to design the Step feature after we were being told the key requirements for MVP. The need for the feature came up several times in client-to-sales team discussions.

Until this moment, I knew how messy the legal work could be. If you are a lawyer from a midsized firm working on several cases, it’s almost guaranteed you will end up with dozens of tasks.

But if these tasks could be broken down into smaller ones, it would be easier for you to handle your huge amount of work.

For MVP, this step feature was meant to be a checklist for tasks. The user could check and uncheck items under the parent task to see overall progress.

But they could not assign these items to team members or set due dates, like they do with tasks. Hence the name 'Steps'—to clearly differentiate from subtasks.

Even though the name was clear, we had to find a solution for visually communicating the exact same thing: a step is not a subtask, and even though it is displayed in the same table, you cannot use it like one.

I really wanted to figure it out, but I was not sure what to do.

So here I was, not quite knowing what to do but very eager to learn about the feature. Certainly, I wasn’t the first one to face this problem. So what better way to learn than to look at what other apps do?

The main thing I wanted to know was if other productivity apps let you assign subtasks or set due dates for them.

I found out that apps like ClickUp, Monday, or Asana will only show a subtask in a table if it supports adding columns to it.

However, only one, Employment Hero, displays subtasks that can’t be assigned. But they do not have any tables, just dashboards.

I presented the insight in a meeting with the product owner and stakeholders.

Thanks to the design lead's support, I felt confident enough to suggest that steps should be shown only in the siderail rather than in the table since users would not be able to use them as tasks.

Despite the fact that everyone agreed that having steps in the table could lead to usability issues, my approach was rejected. It was a must to make the feature visible, and hiding it in the siderail wasn’t an option.

So, I experimented with adding the steps to the table. Usually lawyers task names are enormously long, and I thought, why not make the step full width? This solution turned out to be a gateway to another problem.

Because often users add many columns to a task, the icons ‘Convert to Task’ and ‘Delete’ became hidden. Users had to scroll horizontally to find out they could delete a subtask. This would lead the user to frustration, being stuck with an item they cannot delete. Not great at all.

After trying different widths and discussing the solution with the team, I got the buy-in. It wasn’t perfect; it still needed a little tweak: a tooltip for long names.

After I gained clarity over the solution, I had to take care of all the component states for handoff. And be sure not to leave room for developer guesswork when it comes to flows.

Thanks to all team contributions, we managed to launch the MVP for Steps in a timely manner. The feature was received well by users, apart from one question received by Sales: 'Why can't I assign steps to team members?' An issue that will be addressed during the future improvements.