Timeline: May’21 – Dec’21
OpenText offers several cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) applications to its customers, which are managed through the Admin Portal web application. The primary target users for this portal are Tenant Administrators. Additionally, OpenText provides a developer-centric platform for its partners to consume SaaS applications via APIs and services. This platform was previously known as the DevX Portal. Both the DevX and Admin Portals have similar use cases, such as administering tenants, subscriptions, and applications. A developer can also act as a Tenant Administrator and offer custom or native OpenText applications to their own customers. With this understanding, the organization proposed a unified platform to cater to both the Tenant Administrator and developer personas and provide a seamless user journey.
My role
Lead User Experience Designer.
I worked with a Visual Design Lead on this project who created all the final visual specs. I also collaborated often with UX and Visual Designers from another team (DevX portal).
Process
In order for the project to be a success, first step for the two product teams was to align on roadmap and vision. This was a big challenge as teams were spread across three continents and varying timezones.
OpenText has periodic release cycles so each period sees a big push of features. I worked closely with UX teammates, product managers and development leads to map out a feature roadmap for the quarter that had module level delivery details – which helped in discussing various issues such as technical debt, deign debt, priorities and ownership of various modules.
As a Team Lead, I played a key role in driving crucial decisions and made sure that the solutions followed a user centric approach, led by the process below:
- Roadmap alignment workshop
- Interaction design
- User testing
- Refinements
- Visual design and specs
Problem solving
One of the big challenges of this effort was to provide a unified experience for various personas – developers, tenant admins, subscription admins and other secondary and tertiary personas such as billing admin.
It was important to use common terminology and language for shared objects. Customization of dashboard based on personas was another area where common patterns were utilized to display different metadata so that a common unified behavior while still targeting individual user needs could be addressed. Here are some wireframes that were later on moved on to the visual design stage and went to production. This was a team effort where numerous rounds of reviews were done and feedback was also taken through user testing.
I helped in improving existing design system by introducing new patterns and interaction behaviors wherever existing solutions were not sufficient. As a result, new visual styles were also introduced and made part of the overall corporate design system.
Dashboard
Preview screens
Below are screenshots of some sections of app that were released for preview and to gather feedback from users.
Outcome
I was able to implement the feedback from user testing while working on this project. Several changes were made such as adding a small link to go back to the tenant level menu from the application context. Moving the organization selector from profile menu to top bar.
This was a multi year project with its first release planned on Q2 of 2022. We received encouraging response from users when the wireframes were shared with them. Product Managers also pursued feedback from senior stakeholders – which was very positive.
User management module from this effort was embedded in another existing SaaS application from a different product group based on the modularity and consistency in user experience with that offering.