License Management - Desktop App
This was a redesign focusing on licensing and download purchased products. The original design was created by developers and was extremely confusing for the users. The customer support department spent most of their time helping customers navigate through the application. My job was to simplify the process by redesign the application focusing on the ease of use and providing a more user friendly experience. The final product proved to be successful. The users found it easier to use and navigate through resulting in the ability to license and download products without relying on customer support.
License Manager: Project Overview
My Role:
Mid UX Designer
Team:
Team Size: 6
Producer
2 BE Developers
QA
SME/Stakeholder
UX designer
Duration:
10 months
Deliverables:
I was responsible for Stake holder/SME interviews, Use Case Chart, Flow Diagram, Site Map, Wireframes, Prototypes, Mood-board, UI Kit and Style Guide, Usability Testing, Iconography, and Final UI design.
Process:
Discovery
Interviews
Existing user issues
Evaluation of product
Company expectations
Define
Use cases
Users
Flow diagram
Ideate
Sketches
Wireframes
Brainstorming
Site map
Prototypes
User testing
Design
Final Design & Launch
Mock ups
Moodboard
Visual Design
UI Kit/Style Guide
User testing
Final design docs
UX/UI Review
Tools:
Accomplishments:
Challenges:
The work done changed the way the company was using UX design on their projects. Before this product, the teams would only use a UX designer when they need help with a specific feature in their product/project. After the success of License Manager, POs started requesting UX Designers be full time on their teams.
I introduced a more modern design style which helped to elevated the visual appearance and usability of the product.
Customer support eventually benefited with a decline in customer tickets related to the licensing and downloading of all the company products.
Lessons learned:
The power in utilizing usability testing results to solve design conflicts.
A more clearly defined UX process needs to be planned out and accepted by the PO before the project starts.
The UX department needs to get development teams to support UX as part of the review and QA pipeline on tasks before they get merged into the master build.
What didn't work:
The non linear, open work flow: The first approach from the company when addressing the redesign to this product, was to just make some changes to the current implementation. This direction was very limited in design options and wasn’t providing any solutions that proved to be successful in solving the usability issues.
Combination of open and linear workflows: The second approach was to move to a more linear workflow based off the current solution but trying to add more guidance for the users allowing them to navigate in the correct direction. This direction was better but still to confusing to navigate without extensive use of documentation and in screen directions.
The project started in-house then was moved to a outsourcing partner in mid development. The in house team was disbanded but I remained on the project and work with the outsourcers to complete the product and a new PO that was assigned from our Prague office. Eventually I was assigned to a new project before this product was completed.
UX process was in its infancy at this time and not clearly defined or supported by the company. So UX was not part of the review process pipeline during development resulting in poorly implemented design and functionality. An extensive review was conducted just before delivery and many design issues were address before release and some came in an update later.
The project shifted from being a re-skin of the existing product in an attempt to solve the usability issues quickly and cheaply, to a full redesign after realizing there wasn’t a way to successfully salvage the existing product. This resulted in an unclear UX process.
The producer was very invested in making sure the product was a success that he was constantly tried to micro manage the design.
I was working in an environment that has a history and process of developer driven design, where the UX process was not understood nor readily accepted by the development team or the company.
Being in the military simulation industry, we didn’t have direct access to users to do proper research and discovery. The POs and the BDs were not accustomed to requests for access to their customers and would respond will explaining "we do not have access to the users only the purchasing department".
Working with a lean UX process and not having a UX process already in place.
License Manager: Research & Discovery
Research existing product version:
I explored the application on my own to see if I could figure it out how to use it and I was not successful. The order in which user needs to accomplish various steps in the process was very unclear. There were no affordances for the user to let them know there was an order to the process. This design was heavily reliant on a user following the external documentation while using the product. Unfortunately the documentation was just as confusing.
It didn’t help clarify the process, it just added to the complexity. Users who didn’t fit within the existing use cases listed in the documentation, had to contact support.
From the first day the product was released, support was overwhelmed with customer tickets focused on how to use the product to get their licenses activated.
Screenshots:
Interviews with SME’s:
I had various interviews and conversations with the SME from Support, Producers and PO’s who had direct contact with the customers. (Since I didn’t have direct access to the users, I relied heavily on the SME’s for user information.) This was in part to get a better understanding of why the product was not working for the customers. Basically the users were experiencing the same issues I had when trying to use it: the app was intuitive, it was not clear what to do or if there was an order in which you have to do tasks, and the documentation was also a source of confusion.
During the informal interviews and meetings conducted with the support team I gathered information on the program itself, why the program was not working for the customers, and what needs to be done to fix it. I also questioned what their vision was to solve user confusion, to reduce user frustration and errors, and to remove the user’s reliance on support to be successful. I also read through support tickets as seen below to gather more information on the users issues.
License Manager: Define
Defining Users:
( A very limited amount knowledge was available even after talking to stakeholders and SMEs and it basically boiled down to the following )
1. Military customers
Marines, US Army, Foreign military, IT people, developers, Joe schmoes, contractors, interns, business developers, CEOs.. etc
Don’t forget that Koreans, Japanese, Americans, french, British, Canadian, German, swedes, or even Serbians will be using it as well. - Ryan G. Support Specialist
2. Bisims employees
3. “That’s only a taste of the kind of people that use our
software. “ - Ryan G. Support Specialist
It was a case of design for everyone even though that is the worst way to design products.
User Stories Diagram:
There were various different licensing workflows and within each one there were various user stories outlining who the users were and how they would need to use that workflow to be successful.
Within the online licensing workflow there were 5 different user stories with diagrams showing how they would need to accomplish the online activation with their existing system setup.
Flow Chart:
The flow chart was created from all the research information gathered, from extensive sketches and exploration of various design ideas, and from brainstorming sessions.
License Manager: Ideation
Sketches, Brainstorming & Wireframes:
Numerous iterations of design ideas were explored through white boarding, brainstorming sessions, sketches and eventually loose wireframes. We brainstormed various directions to explore to simplify the application. Part of that included trying to work off the original design and clarify it, and we went as far as an entire redesign and how that could be approached.
Eventually, higher fidelity wireframes of concepts of the layouts were developed. Extensive explorations was utilized to figure out the complicated workflow that would be needed to cover the various use cases of all customers. Once we had a few solid directions, we share the designs with SME’s and stakeholders to get feedback before moving on. It was looking like a wizard approach was going to be the best approach for the users.
Site Map:
Once a direction was approved and solidified, a site map was created and the information architecture was tested with users to verify the work flow was lined up with users mental models.
Error Handling and Prevention:
We conducted meetings to list all possible errors. Once we had the list of known errors, we discussed if there were ways to prevent them from occurring.
If prevention wasn’t possible from a technical or time stand point, error handling was discussed and implemented.
License Manager: Prototype & User Testing
Prototype - High fidelity
A full color prototype was created for the whole application. It was necessary to have the entire workflow functioning so each licensing variant could be tested in a way that would allow the users to take wrong paths and self correct if they had any issues. With the liner wizard style workflow, users getting lost and/or taking the wrong path was part of what we were testing. We wanted to see if assumptions made based on user stories data if the choices the user would have to make in the application were clear.
The testing also included gathering information and feedback on the design itself since this was a new style and color scheme. Up until now, the company product line was very outdated and needed to be improved in usability and style.
We also addressed other larger scale aspects of the product in the testing included: the offline work flows, the stepper navigation, and the use of dongles.
User Testing:
There ended up being 3 test sessions based upon the results gathered.
In the first session, the test was designed to have the participants navigate through 7 different use cases. There were 13 main points bing tested.
The results showed some small items that needed adjustments such a button labels, but there ended up being 5 main areas to retest due to users being confused on the functionality.
Once solutions were implemented into the prototype they were retested. These included:
• License monitoring page
• Filtering system
• Functionality of the computer selection in the cards
• Make a support option to retrieve a license footprint file
• Make the downloads authorization file process on the
support page to be the same as in the main workflow
• Rename the “close” button to “Exit License Manager”.
In the second test session, many fixes were successful, but some solutions proved to create new usability issues.
The tabs solution for the monitoring page was not successful but we had found a solution for the filters. We needed to retest the downloads authorization file and the tables solution. The results on these 2 items were not conclusive so retesting was necessary.
With the third session, since all users tested were able to complete the tasks successfully without getting stuck, the solutions proved to be working and further rounds of testing were not necessary at that time.
Explorations that were tested for the filter and sort functionality:
One of the main issues that the user testing brought to light was that the users were confused on how it worked. We ended up having to explore various variations of how to turn the filters on and off and went through 3 rounds of user testing before we got it right.
License Manager: Design
IU Kit, Style Guide, Mood Boards & Iconography:
Designing the UI for License Manager was an exciting part of the UX/UI process for this application. It was an opportunity to define a new looks and feel for all the company products coming up in development.
This progress of updating to a more modern design style, was the stepping stone for the company as a whole. It was the first time the company allowed a team to deviated from the original product styles that they had been using from years. These styles were not up to date with the designs of today. They had been designed by developers and that resulted in them being hard for users to learn.
They were not intuitive or user friendly and were very geared towards the people who designed them.
A dark UI scheme was decided on so as not to deviate too far from the current product style. In exploring the new style, we decided that we should distinguish different product categories based on a highlight color. So tools such as License Manager have been marked with the green seen below in the color list. The main product kept it’s orange color and developer tools ended up with a purple highlight color, and so on.
The new style was widely accepted and liked by the company as a whole. This style became the base for the redesign of the flagship product.
Here is the final design for the License Manager application with the features that were implemented.
User feedback was gathered by the company after release. The results were not great since there were numerous development issues and bugs that prevented the product from working as intended.
A round of bug fixing and improvements followed and an update was released. One of the feature that didn’t make it in the first release was found to be a requirement for one of our bigger customers and eventually that went into production and released about a year later.
Feedback:
License Manager: Develop and Launch
Results to the company:
After a couple of years after the products release, the application has proven to be successful in reducing the amount of time support was spending on helping customer with licensing and downloading of products. Basically the amount of time support had to spend on hand holding and walking the customers step by step through the licensing process was reduced to almost nothing.
When a graph was complied, the tickets for support had gone up, but this was a result of customers having technical issues with their systems and was not due to the usability of the application. Switching to the WIBU licensing made the process more secure, and even though the process was easier, this product could not account for what the customer has to do on their end to get the licenses working on their complex networking configurations.