Product: Experience Management for IR Collaborate

Responsibilities: Discovery, UX design, UI design, user testing

Overview

Enterprise businesses and service providers need to uphold their service level and continuously improve performance for communication systems. Without centralised and effective toolsets it’s difficult to deal with the complexity in networks, devices and all the connected services especially during outage. IR helps these customers remove the complexity and minimise costly disruptions.

My Role

IR wants to accelerate their brand new SaaS business with their customers. The sales were also under pressure to hit their sales target given the investments. With the MVP cloud platform created, we need to quickly expand to provide troubleshooting and analytics capabilities to support Collaborate customers. From the beta feedback, we hope we can fill some gaps with additional capabilities. My challenge was to pin point the problem and address user pains, while helping the business achieve the goal.

Research and Discovery

Working with product manager, I initiated product discovery with customers, internal SMEs and sales to understand the problem space and the value we can aim for.

Across the team, there were strong assumptions that our products serves technical users and making decisions with that by default. We discovered that we need to serve lower tier engineers like service desk agents which can impact greatly with our approach on design.

Design and Validation

I mapped out key user stories to outline scenarios. Working with product manager and lead engineer, we’ve ideated some possible solutions focused on bigger pain points like triaging and correlating issues. One thing stood out in particular is the ability to visualise calls from end to end. We could highlight where issues are found. We were confident that this would be a potential differentiator from competitors.

Next, I moved on to prototype possible ways the calls can be visualised and how users might interact with it in given scenarios. From user testings, I’ve validated the value and utility of the visualisation. There are usability issues we want to address, but doing so requires much bigger effort so we’ve parked them for future improvements.

The Result

The release was a commercial success. Customers pleased to see visual representation of the call flow that they can’t get in other products. From the team retro, most of us felt great team work throughout. Successfully break through the usual communication mode (formal emails and meetings) and work iteratively as a team and provide timely and frequent feedback.

The product improvements resulted in: 


10% increase usage on troubleshooting

5% increase success rate on applying filters and click through to the call flow

4m 4s avg. time saved from taking action on data during troubleshooting

Overall, the release of call flow visualisation (marketed as Experience Qquality 360) helped attract new customers and migrate existing customers to the cloud. Increased licensed users to 1.1M in FY21.