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ELECTRIC IT HUB
THE PROBLEM
Electric’s old product, Turbine, is a services-based product where our customers would chat with our service desk via Slack or Teams for help on their IT issues.
This approach was labor-intensive, prone to errors, expensive, and not scalable.
THE CHALLENGE
Electric made the decision to pivot as a business to a SaaS forward model, offering a user-friendly platform that could help our customers manage their own IT with confidence.
ROLE
Product designer,
UX researcherTIMELINE
February 2023 - November 2023
The Process
Note: this wasn’t a linear process - sometimes we flipped between steps
VISION AND DISCOVERY
Figure out who we’re building for and what the future looks like as a SaaS product.
BRINGING OUR APPLICATION TO PARITYSeeing what existing functionality we have in our current product that we want to bring over.
PROTOTYPING AND TESTING
Collect insights for new features.
BETA RELEASE Check how ideas work in real life.
Vision & Discovery
New Product
Vision
- Electric makes IT easy for small businesses.
- Electric’s platform gives small businesses the expertise, the tools, and visibility to proactively manage their IT with confidence.
Our Persona
For the new product, I was tasked with creating the admin experience. Out of all our current personas, Non-technical Nat fit that archetype the most.
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UX Research: The Challenge
Because of limitations, we weren’t able to easily find people that fit our ideal customer profile
What I did to learn more:
- Reading past research studies
- Went on reddit to read IT manager’s frustrations
- Explored other research platforms that could help us find our ICP
- Reduce assumptions around user behavior by testing out new features with our current customers
- Mix in foundational research along with testing, to infer the future roadmap
Top Tasks
In late 2022, our UX research team performed a “Top tasks” study that identified and validated some of our biggest customer needs. The study had given us the most important tasks for our customers:
I co-led a brainstorming workshop with cross-functional teams, including product and engineering, to redefine our product without its former service aspect. This collaborative effort helped us generate innovative ideas and solidify a clear direction.
We were able to prioritize the features we wanted to start with.
Bringing the App to Parity
Building a product from ground zero is daunting, especially figuring out where to start. Recognizing the strengths of our old product, we strategically brought over what worked well while identifying areas for improvement.
User Management
Why did we start with people?
From our past workshop, we aimed to be more employee centric because that’s what we heard from customers - they don’t think in terms of laptops but who uses them. In order to get started on our platform, we needed people to connect devices to.
With this new user management experiencce we included:
- Easy enrollment
- HRIS intetgration
- Employee profiles
- Employee groups
new features
Desktop Application & MDM
We created a desktop application that could read an employee’s device’s health and security. For our higher tiered plan users, this app is a conduit to install MDM, to push IT policies on employee’s devices.
MDM was a challenging concept to grasp, but I collaborated with our internal IT experts to learn the ins and outs in order to streamline this experience for our customers.
IT Scorecard
The IT Scorecard is our homepage in Turbine, it’s a high level view of a company’s device related health and security.
Our past research told us that admins want the data to be actionable.
So for example, 3 of my employees don’t have firewall? What can I do about it? Our desktop application reads the computer’s stats, and admins can email instructions to their employees to fix their device issues.
Wireframe version
Hifi version
Onboarding Guide
To start on this process, I built out a diagram and discussed with the PM and engineers what we absolutely needed to get started on IT hub, we divided it into 3 steps.
The goal was to show the user value straight up by having the admin download the app so they could read their own IT stats
We led them through a progression system, guiding our admins through a journey of the minimum steps to get started on IT hub, checking off, and patting their back each step of the way.
Prototyping and Testing
Employee Groups:
The Context
We developed a new product which we called, “employee groups” in order to speed up onboarding by having preset applications and hardware.
The challenge was coming to a shared understanding between stakeholders given our limitations around accessible data.
I proposed we talk to current customers about this new feature and get their mental model around groups in order to make more informed product decisions.
Hypothesis
Employee groups may be leveraged to simplify onboardings/offboardings using group presets to determine which applications, hardware, employees in a given group should receive. Questions
How will users use employee groups?
Does the employee group creation flow makes sense?
What is the user’s expectation around the flexibility of groups? Study type
User interviews and
Prototype testing
Number of participants
4 participants
The Prototype
I built a prototype in figma and had them imagine a scenario where they’re building out an engineering group.
The flow had 3 steps:
1. Adding employees
2. Selecting devices
3. Selecting applications
Research Insights
I affinity mapped the qualitative data I gathered during the testing sessions and interviews and came up with the top insights below.
These last 2 insights really shaped the product decisions for this feature. Before the testing, the PM wanted to make groups inflexible, allowing 1 person per group.
After this presentation, product changed requirements after we learned about how admins thought of groups. So I consider that a win in my book.
Beta Release
Beta Features
Below are all the features we built out in 9 months. I starred all the features I owned designs for.
I wanted to point back at our top tasks we chatted about during our discovery phase, I marked what features relate to our top tasks.
Throughout the process, I maintained close collaboration within the design team, so we could have a holistic view of the user experience across the entire product. We had regular syncs and critiques to ensure alignment and improvement.
Project Monitoring
The team released Electric IT Hub on November 15, 2023. We currently have 7 customers on the platform.
We’re tracking their activity in Looker and Pendo. We plan on reaching out and gathering feedback/insights from users to make future improvements to the Electric IT Hub.
Learnings & Reflections
Although this project had its challenges, I believe strengthening the connection of product decisions and research findings would facilitate smoother collaboration.
Documentation case study