Admin Center

‍

‍

Research

Beginning with Heuristics

A heuristic evaluation was performed to understand big experience gaps and product misses across the system and diagnose the current state of the system and recommend methods to help us understand where we needed to go. Aesthetic & minimalist design, visibility of system status, match between system and the real world were a few of the many heuristics that the existing admin experience violated.

‍

‍

‍

‍

Benchmark Testing & Interview

Study Overview & Participants

Research was conducted remotely over 1.5 weeks with 7 existing Smartsheet users who identify as the main plan administrator ranging from business users to IT Professionals. Metrics that I measured were time on task, SUS and saturation from qualitative interviews.

‍

Findings & Product Strategy

‍

‍

‍

‍

Shifting our executive stakeholder's perspective

Using a participatory design methodology helped shift our leadership's priorities. I invited my cross functional team of engineers and product managers to observe and watch the usability test and interviews which resulted in product and engineering empathizing with customer's pain. This led to my teammates advocating for UX to invest in rebuilding the entire system, rather than building brand new features on top of the existing system. Together we shifted the perspective of our executives, and advocated for people's needs to take priority, over the feature-driven roadmap.

‍

‍

Ideation

A workshop with just about everyone

I hosted a day long workshop to review research findings and brainstorm solutions. 15 people ranging from product, engineering, leadership, IT, customer success, and sales came together, listened and shared ideas.

After the workshop we translated the real sticky notes into Miro to start grouping and prioritizing user stories with our PM.

‍

‍

‍

‍

Then We Sketched!

At the workshop we had all the participants sketch out ideas, concepts and solutions. Some of the themes across the variety of sketches included: Enriching Admin Center with customer data to include license count, spend & more. A flexible navigation to allow for growth across the system and a scalable system based design patterns - moving away from modal based designs will allow users to flow better through the app.

‍

‍

‍

‍

Reimagining the Information Architecture

The original I/A and design patterns didn't support some of the multi-step use cases across user and group management, and settings, which are at the heart of the admin experience.  I mapped out a new I/A to reflect some of the scalability that we needed to support. Take a look at the detailed version here

‍

‍

‍

Prototyping & Testing

After sketching out some of the main interactions in the system, I translated these ideas into a digital prototype and began creating end to end interactions for adding & editing users and groups, transferring someone's assets to another user.

I tested 4 scenarios with 6 customers to get their feedback on the designs conceptually but to also see how easily and quickly they could move through the tasks, to compare time on task from the original benchmark testing.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Feedback from testing

Users responded well to the concept and interactions, they liked the idea of presenting more customer data but shared they wanted more. We decided that in addition to redesigning the existing system, we also needed a place to pull everything in together - a home/dashboard experience for admin center.

‍

1. User and Group management - participants responded well to the right panel as the area to enter their data, it provided a clear start and end, without taking them away from the main screen

2. The concept tested for Settings prioritized friendly non technical security and provisioning content, and it landed well with users

3. Customers are craving reporting and information - Participants need better usage reporting and insights to identify when to remove or repurpose a license, and to inform them about what account settings should be enabled based on their security needs

‍

‍

Final Designs

‍

Home

‍

User Management

Group Management

License Requests

Reflection

Admin center provided me with the opportunity to execute an end to end project leading both research and design. It was my first 'real' project outside of my Master's program at HCDE and I loved being able to begin using the theory and methods in the real world. I leveraged a participatory design methodology to my research and project by bringing in engineering and product stakeholders early and often. These stakeholders developed empathy for our customers and ended up advocating that we fund a foundational project like a full redesign of admin center, so that we have a strong foundation to execute future enterprise admin projects on top of admin center. Seeing my research change the roadmap and get our CPO on board was so exciting. This project taught me a lot about stakeholder management, building trust with peers and partners, and ultimately allowed me to grow as a designer to better understand design patterns, how to receive feedback and identify what design feedback to act on and more. Since launching admin center roughly 10+ projects have been executed on top of it to help Smartsheet's enterprise customers manage their plans, security and data at scale.