Redesign, Unify and Innovate Application Management
Project Scope
The redesign & unification of 3 powerful thick client application management products into one user friendly and innovative SaaS application in order to improve competitive positioning.
My Role
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Global Product Design Lead overseeing 5 UX designers remotely, 1 UI designer & 1 UX Researcher.
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Routine presentations to over 130 project members including business unit SVP's, VP's, Product. Managers, Engineering, Support, & Presales.
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Responsible for identifying and leveraging design components that could be utilized across the enterprise.
UX Challenges
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Frequent task failures. The user base had become less technical with less expertise in the domain leading to frequent task failures in workflows that were designed for expert users.
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Users were overwhelmed. Lacking a role or task based experience users were overwhelmed by the number of features presented.
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Unification/Integration of products was needed. The product was comprised of three disparate applications; each with different backends, front ends and UX patterns.
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High ramp-up time. The product had a very high ramp-up time, meaning only a few people at each customer site were able to use it.
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Project team consisted of 10 product managers and 8 engineering teams using different methodologies. Some teams were using an agile approach, while others a variation of agile and waterfall. Flexibility was required in order to keep the project cohesive.
Design Goals
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Must ready to use for 80% of customers out of box, customizable for expert users.
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Design proven, intuitive workflows for common use cases.
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Solve for the needs of various personas.
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Unified & modern look and feel
Discover, Research & Define
Understanding the business.
We took a dive deep into the current domain, the domain forecast, the three products and the competitive landscape. We performed a Competitive Analysis, stakeholder interviews to understand the problems the business was trying to solve, and identified the KPI's for success.
Understanding the users.
During that time we also validated the personas (created by a third party 2 years prior) with presales, sales and other customer touchpoints and updated where necessary. We spoke with technical support to understand the top calls, we ran contextual interviews at 5 customer sites, and hosted 18 user interviews.
Defining our strategy
Initially we created a task analysis (later used to guide Epics and stories) & journey maps. Next we planned and presented our strategy and roadmap to key stakeholders and updated the requirements to incorporate our findings & direction. I was responsible for obtaining project sign off from 18 stakeholders and creating the project plan for UX deliverables.
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Design & Validation
Ideation & Prototyping
After several ideation sessions our team developed an information architecture, wireframes, and high fidelity prototypes that covered priority task flows and all user messaging. Once we completed usability testing we moved to designing wireframes for non priority tasks and developed technical specifications for those engineering teams using a waterfall methodology, while others on our team would dig into detailed designs and work closely with engineering teams using Agile methodology to provide guidance or modify designs if necessary.
Visual Design
Our visual designer created a visual language style guide, keeping consistence with the company style and adding to the company style guide when new functionality required additional styles.
Validation
Key workflows were tested by users, or user representatives such as our presales and swat personnel, through remote or in person usability feedback sessions. Designs were then modified based on session findings and added to backlogs if development had already started and findings weren't show stoppers.
Solving a design challenge
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Reduce Triager's time trying to identify the root cause of a problem.
The new suspected cause feature will take the user to a page that shows the evidence the system found to support this finding allowing a Triager to quickly move problems to the correct folks for further diagnostics or fixes.
Reduce the amount of time a level 1 Triager has to spend triaging a problem in the product.
The Problem Overview page and Problem Summary feature integrates and organizes problem data from multiple systems so the Triager can more easily locate the problem information and actions they need.
Results