Multiplayer Collaborative Canvas  ·  View 04 of 23  ·  People and journeys

Journey — Two Designers, One File

The journey the product is sold on, and the one moment where convergence becomes visible to a person.

Editable source SVG draw.io All views
Product designer web editor, office Wi-Fi Goal — Move the same frames as my colleague and never think about saving Trigger — A review in forty minutes and two people splitting the work Done when — One file, both sets of changes, no duplicate layers and no lost work 1 · Open file already live 2 · Edit in parallel 3 · Collide ◆ moment of truth 4 · Hand off 5 · Present ◆ moment of truth What they do Opens the file Sees two cursors Drags a frame Renames layers Both move one layer @mentions a reviewer Opens in the meeting What the platform does Warm session, roster Local echo, then ack Sequenced, last write wins Comment anchored Checkpoint, named version How it feels Trusts it Fine Doubts it Where it hurts Layer jumps back once Stale thumbnail in the file list Journey — Two Designers, One File The trough is the only moment the convergence rules become visible to a person: the loser of a concurrent move must be told, not silently corrected. v 1.0 · owner Platform Architecture · date 2026-10

The trough is a design constraint

  • Both designers move the same layer inside the same second. One of them loses, and the only acceptable version of losing is being told: the client that lost shows the layer snapping back and a note saying why (view 13, message 11).
  • A silent correction here is what makes users stop trusting a collaborative tool — they cannot tell a resolved conflict from a lost edit, so they start duplicating files.
  • This is why conflict outcomes are specified per class and identical on every client, and why randomised replay is a release gate (ADR-05).

What the platform does at each phase

  • Open: the session is already live, so the roster and the document arrive from memory — the warm-open p95 of 700 ms.
  • Edit in parallel: local echo at 0 ms, acknowledgement at p99 120 ms, peer visibility at p99 250 ms.
  • Present: the final checkpoint and the named version make the meeting's state recoverable afterwards.

Known rough edge

  • The file-list thumbnail is a derived rendition and lags the document; the set keeps it derived rather than promising freshness it would have to pay for on every edit.
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Microsoft Azure · Platform Architecture · 2026-1004-journey-design-together