Enterprise businesses and service providers need to uphold their service level agreement (SLA) 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.

After significant investments, IR wants to accelerate their brand new SaaS business. Sales were also under pressure to hit their targets. We wanted to roll out the first SaaS based Collaborate product, providing real time troubleshooting and analytics capabilities for unified communication systems.

One of the key challenge for my role was to bring in user insights to influence product management, given the team’s strong domain expertise but low UX maturity.

Based on the beta feedback, I was tasked to fix existing dashboards and to design new ones. Through many conversations, I quickly realised that the team weren’t clear on who are we building for and what was the problem we’re solving. Working with product management, lead engineer and sales, I proposed a 3 weeks discovery, to understand the problem, user pain points and possible opportunities that we have not thought of. This would also help us de-risk from having engineers to build a wrong product when the team seems attached to the idea of “building more dashboards”.

We were able to set up interviews with one of our key customers. At the same time leveraging beta feedback and expertise from internal SMEs. We set a goal to ship a usable product which would allow us to expand on later.

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.

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.