This business strategy took us back to the drawing board, we already had some portals integrated with Business center. The challenge is that the current design was not scalable enough going forward, we had gotten feedback about how bifurcated the experience of navigating between  Business Center  and 3rd party portals.

Working closely with our AT&T User experience research team who had conducted a B2B enterprise navigation study and Cloud portal integration usability report – they had conducted one-on-one interviews with 7 users comprising of 3 Enterprise, 2 Mid-market, 2 Small Business users which lasted with 75 minutes

All sessions were recorded digitally.

The summary of our top findings from the research are:

1. Transition is abrupt with no clear back button: Again, the transition between portals is not made clear to the user. Providing a splash screen between portals would ease the transition.

   • No clear way to get back to the Business Center portal once the user has been sent to the Cloud portal. provide a large and distinct link or button to transition back to Business Center at their exit point into

   Cloud portal: The current state also did not show a look and feel that match between the portals. Having Cloud Portal match the Business Center look and feel will help alleviate the disorientation when leaving Business Center to go to Cloud Portal.

2. Legibility and Discoverability: The empty state of the widget has light and small font. Increasing the weight and font size will help readability and fundability for the user.

3. Inconsistent patterns: Kick-off points for creating new user or sub accounts, does not match the pattern of the “buy now” or “Assign VLAN” flow. Some of the creation flow patterns start in the header while others will appear in the content space. the inconsistency will cause confusion for users and incorrect expectations.

4. Movement between portals is not clear: The transition between portals can be abrupt and disorienting. User may be left confused about their current location and how they could get back to where they were.

5. Dashboard and home page are not task oriented: The shortcuts titles and much of Cloud Portal are not labeled with individual fundamental tasks. Users are having to interpret rather or not their goal, that they want to accomplish , can be done so under these generic titles.

6. Not task oriented: When users first come to the portal, their initial step is not obvious or intuitive.

Jeff

Network Engineer

Velo Cloud User

” I need to be able to monitor my network, create tickets and manage users in both business center and Velo cloud application.”

Responsibility:

Oversees all the locations for the eastern region. Jeff  hires and works with network coordinators within his company to monitor the network health and ordering process.

He is also responsible for creating project plans when a need for a new service or inventory arises.

Needs/Challenges

1. Struggles with incomplete, missing or unavailable details in the system -location, asset ID (Circuit ID, telephone number, e.t.c.) and charges.
2. Struggles with cumbersome reporting  tools.
3. Needs better link between inventory, Ordering and Billing.
4. Has challenges navigating the web application and its corresponding 3rd party portals.

So, we conducted our first design studio with the following user task in mind:

“As a network administrator i will like to navigate to Global Delivery and Assurance portal (GD&A) from my Business center dashboard.”