the challenge

The challenge with this Keysight project was to design a software licensing management portal for multimillion dollar budget customers to manage their software licenses. The challenge was that it lended itself naturally to a shopping cart metaphor, but pushed that metaphor to its limits. It had to not only be a cart, but a perpetually open cart. The user needed to add or subtract license with some restrictions on which ones they could change and when, as well ass assign them to a host in multiple different ways and then retrieve those license keys in different ways. They didn’t have a real customer facing method for this in the past that worked well so it was a ground up creation. It had to be easy to use and a relatively fast process.

gathering

The design process began with working with the internal team who had already begun the discovery phase, pre project kickoff. I collected materials from them including some requirements details, use cases, and some user stories. I gathered reported pain-points and issues related to the current methods of communication and collaboration across the different business units and its relative failures. I collected some information related to individual personas, which had already been collected from the business and reformulated and solidified previously created personas and created the ones that were missing.

research

The research began with stakeholder workshops. I conducted and participated in many information gathering and design workshops with key stakeholders to gather direct feedback and pain-points and refine the wishlist and must haves. These workshops were conducted over several weeks and resulted in some intense information gathering. I received logos and a current style guide. I helped refined user journey maps and created detailed user personas and use cases. I created personas, wireframes of general concepts and contributed to roadmapping and solution architecture. Research into a component library that would fit the bill that we could agree to pull from was also completed as well as recommendations on what framework we should standardize on.

design

The design began with 15 very detailed personas that represented a vast sample of the user base for the company. These were well documented and presented to the business and served as our guid to who our users are and what their needs were. Initial basic wireframes came next to present the basic suggested concept and to hammer out details of how things might work. The resulting design workshops and revisions that followed resulted in high fidelity mock ups through out the design process. During the entire design process, close collaboration took place with the dev team in order to verify and validate feasibility as well as recommendations on what framework and component library we should use. Many rounds of refinement and feedback workshops solidified details and fine points resulting in numerous revisions. I worked with the dev team throughout the project to answer design questions and help guide design problems not specifically addressed in the initial design and other like issues.

the solution

The solution was a design that evolved quickly towards the business needs and better design all together; a result of true collaboration effort among the stakeholders of the project.

results

The design gave the business a lightyear leap for their customers in terms of giving users hands on access to their own licenses. Deliverables were 15 detailed personas, numerous visual mock ups, and many high fidelity wire frames.