How might we create a consistent and intuitive license management experience for all PTC products?
Redesign PTC’s license management portal to improve usability, customer satisfaction and decrease the number of help tickets being raised.
PROJECT BRIEF
TIMELINE
March ‘21 - December ‘21
Figma, Figjam
TOOLS
User research
UX design
Usability testing
MY RESPONSIBILITIES
1 Project manager
1 UX designer
1 UI designer
1 Business analyst
COLLABORATORS
THE PROCESS
01 DISCOVER
User research | Stakeholder interviews | Competitor analysis
02 DEFINE
Persona | User journeys | Stakeholder workshops | Feature prioritisation
03 DESIGN ITERATION 1
Sketching | Wire-framing | Visual design | Prototyping
04 USABILITY TEST 1
Moderated user testing | Unmoderated user testing | Analysis
05 DESIGN ITERATION 2
Revised wireframes | Revised visual design | Prototyping
06 USABILITY TEST 2
Moderated user testing | Unmoderated user testing | Analysis
07 FINAL HANDOFF
High fidelity UI screens ready for development
Understanding PTC and the user
01 DISCOVER
Survey questionnaire
01
03
Stakeholder interviews
05
Customer interviews
36
Survey participants
“Your licensing and renewal process is complicated and unreliable beyond belief. Every year when it is time to renew we take a deep breath and begin the process again, wondering which problem we will encounter this time.”
“Numerous, tedious, repetitively ridiculous issues while waiting well over a month to get a trial license, which could ONLY be installed with the help of tech support”
“Each year I am the one telling you what we have and where, not very professional”
Fig: Affinity mapping / categorising insights gathered.
Fig: Understanding user’s journey on the existing license management platform.
Challenges identified
Fragmented licensing technologies / experience across products.
Manual, siloed, error-prone processes.
Limited entitlement, license & usage visibility.
Limited ability to enforce compliance & limit overuse. Inconsistent policies.
Ever-increasing complexity with the addition of new versions & acquisitions.
Business impact
Low customer & partner satisfaction
High cost of operations & support
Lost internal productivity
Revenue leakage / untapped potential
Low ease of doing business with PTC
02 DEFINE
Making sense of the data
We conducted three workshops with stakeholders which helped us align cross-functional teams on business goals and validate our assumptions regarding user journeys and personas.
Headlines of tomorrow challenged the participants to bring out their most optimistic ideas to goal setting.
Involving stakeholders in building personas.
Understanding user's tasks on the portal.
Brainstorming and problem solving.
Prioritising features.
Logic diagrams for user's journeys were created and validated with the stakeholders.
An important outcome of the workshops was our three personas: Vlad, Eric and Elena.
Vlad’s tasks on the LM portal
ADDING A LICENSING HOST
Vlad has to register his servers / computers as licensing hosts on the portal.
Vlad has to assign a purchased product to a registered host on the portal to start using it.
ASSIGNING PRODUCTS
If Vlad wishes to use a product on a different computer he has to remove it from its current host or move it to anther host.
MOVING OR REMOVING ASSIGNED PRODUCTS
RETRIEVING A LICENSE FILE
Vlad may choose to retrieve the licensing file of a host.
Vlad can download a purchased product as well as license report of specific time period from the portal.
DOWNLOADING A PRODUCT AND REPORTS
RENEWING LICENSE
When a license expires, Vlad can initiate its renewal from the portal.
03 DESIGN ITERATION 1
Getting started with making
User stories were defined for key user tasks post which we created the first iteration of UX wireframes followed by UI screens within 4 weeks.
Low fidelity UX wireframes for ‘Assign product’ (previously configure) flow created during early stages of design.
UI screens for the same flow created at the end of the first design cycle.
Many ideas were explored for the landing page and the license table.
04 USABILITY TEST 1
TEST OBJECTIVES
USABILITY
How intuitively are users able to interact with the design.
TASK COMPLETION RATES
How successfully are users able to complete the given tasks.
VERBIAGE
How familiar are users with technical terminologies.
SATISFACTION SCORE
How do users rate the overall experience on the interface and the added new features.
Recruiting participants
We made sure our group of test participants was diverse in terms of scale of organisation, types of PTC products they used etc.
Unmoderated tests responses
36
03
Unmoderated tests
Screener questionnaire
01
05
Moderated tests
Testing insights
High task completion rate (~ 90% )
Low learning curve (<10% mis-clicks on dashboard in 2nd test)
TASK COMPLETION RATES
Users are comfortable using features such as search and filter to find the specified product package.
Identifying the right actionable package, the most difficult step for users.
Users seem to be overwhelmed with information on the dashboard.
USABILITY
Certain terminologies such as 'license repository', 'package', ‘host’ ‘configure’ caused confusion for users.
VERBIAGE
Average satisfaction score: 3.7/5.
‘Retrieve license’ flow received lowest score as many users struggled to complete the task.
SATISFACTION SCORE
04 USABILITY TEST 1
05 DESIGN ITERATION 2
Working from the feedback
Armed with the insights gathered from usability testing, we entered the second phase of design.
We collaborated with stakeholders once again to brainstorm on ‘How might we..’ statements to solve problems identified in usability testing.
New wireframes developed post ideation.
Polished UI screens and prototypes were created after wireframing.
Key improvements in design after testing
1 . Manage products, not packages
Customers purchased packages but they used and managed products. One of the biggest changes we drove was embracing a product first approach.
2 . Introduction of guided flows
Many of our users visited the LM portal once in six months or even less. They needed a little more guidance. Introduction of ‘guided flows’ empowered these users.
The final design
06 USABILITY TEST 2
Key insights
We put our designs to a final test, once again conducting qualitative as well as quantitative testing.
TASK COMPLETION RATES & CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
97% of the users successfully used the ‘search & filter components’ and found the experience of finding products pleasant.
73% said they liked the product selection approach.
An average of 96.6% task completion rate was oerved.
Users said the guided flows made it easy to perform tasks.
Table free dashboard and dynamic ‘Recent orders’ component made data accessible and manageable.
USABILITY
Verbiage was intuitive for most of the users. Primary action buttons on the dashboard and action description made it easier to use the interface.
VERBIAGE
07 FINAL HANDOFF
Wrapping up
At the end of our journey we handed over high fidelity UI prototypes, ready for dev. The MVP is currently in development.
Learnings and reflections
You don’t need to nail the design in it’s first iteration, the product always evolves.
Testing early and often with a small group of selected participants is perhaps the fastest way to arrive at “good design.”
THE DESIGN PROCESS
If a stakeholder is always critical, they might just be under a lot of pressure. Communicate every little milestone with them and try to make them feel reassured.
STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
Record every idea and suggestion on designs/features during design reviews or grooming sessions, it’ll prevent a lot of frustration later.
Document your journey through every project, big or small. It’ll help you see how far you’ve come and how much you’ve grown.
IMPORTANCE OF DOCUMENTATION
