CLOUD LIFE CYCLE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Simplifying Building Cloud Hosting Accounts for Internal Customers

Following the Account Management Dashboard project within the Cloud Hosting provisioning website, I was tasked with improving the workflow for one of our other major personas: the Cloud Product Developers, namely those involved with the delivery of products to the account owners. Through extensive interviewing and updating design schema based on usability testing feedback from previous projects, I was able to help reduce turnaround time and task complexity by a significant margin.

The problem:
How can we simplify our Cloud Software Delivery team's building of accounts for customers?

My Role:

UI/UX Designer
UX Researcher

The Team:

Two UX Designers
Two Front End Engineers
Product Manager

Tools Used:

Figma
Interviews

My Contributions:

Design of UI and UX
Prototyping
Design System Updates

The Process:

Empathize

Customer interviews, feedback gathering from Product Manager
Identify customer goals/tasks

Specify

Speficy persona(s) of focus
Prioritize features and workflows

Ideate

Low-fidelity mockups
Multiple versions of task UI

Bring to Life

Figma prototype
Direct work with front-end engineers

Verify

Additional feedback gathering

Outcomes:

Simplified workload
- No longer needing to go to two separate websites to perform tasks
  - More simplified UX Index score thanks to lower cognitive load
- Easier data lookup
Reduced turnaround time
- Easier to perform tasks en masse

ROADBLOCKS IN DELIVERY

Going into this project, cloud developers on our delivery team had a few major goals with this workflow

Browse requests for products, services, and decommissions.
Edit information on specific requests such as account names, numbers, business units, etc.
Decommission accounts quickly to avoid confusion
Inability to access their accounts' change logs, which prevented team members from being up to speed
Perform Azure DevOps actions such as creating a new build for the account

This team had a number of setbacks performing these tasks, however:

Visiting multiple websites to perform a single task such as the external Azure DevOps site
An existing website that would consistently slow down and have a poor layout for browsing

This resulted in other issues:

Increased turnaround time for delivery of requested products etc.
In cases where accounts had multiple owners, delays could result in confusion as to whether certain actions have been requested or implemented

REIMPLEMENTING AND IMPROVING

This product followed a similar layout to that of the Account Management Dashboard (AMD), albeit with a few different goals in mind:

Facilitate browsing with a compact, tabular layout
- Include tabs for quick switching between products, services, and decommissions
- Allow filtering to easily find items
View and edit details of requests
Perform secondary actions such as editing builds

Some major differences between this and the Account Management Dashboard, however, included the following:

Mass actions did not need to be performed due to the detail-oriented focus of this workflow.
Actions shouldn't be performed from the table, meaning that details pages were a must.

Usability testing feedback about the Account Management Dashboard indicated that users had difficulty recognizing that they could perform actions from the row. This was due to an icon button on the right side of the rows indicating the action of revealing, which was not always visible or understood well.

Our solution was simple: make the whole AMD row natively clickable. In addition, rather than including a details action button indicating a link, we simply did the same with this project as well.

For the layout itself, we utilized our design system to simplify the table loadout and indicated editable items on details pages via icon buttons.

Ultimately, a comprehensive Figma prototype was created to make sure all avenues were accounted for, moving multiple actions on different websites into modals on a single page.

Deliverable Coming Soon