The appliance registration and setup is a critical process for customers to receive technical support from Veritas Response Team. The Veritas Enablement Portal helps generate $47 million in revenue and is part of the $400 million Appliance Business at Veritas.
Goals
- Customers would have to register all appliances they purchased from Veritas.
- The customers are also able to set up the teams who would support their appliances, site where the appliances would be physically located, and point of contacts who would directly work with Veritas Response Team in case of hardware faults and issues.
- Customers are looking for a simpler way of registering appliances for their data center/private cloud infrastructure.
Problems
- Users should be able to register appliances without filling up the “lengthy” form information
- The current registration process does not indicate the model type/information properly.
- Users are overwhelmed by “too much” information, especially in the site information.
- The current registration process is not efficient when the user is trying to register multiple appliances.
- The current registration process does not allow customers to set up “Teams” to support the appliances in the data center.
- The current registration process does not support several important additional features like custom site requirements, multiple “support” windows for support contacts, a complete overview of appliance status, and many more.
Users/Target audience
- Site Admin
- Support Engineers
Research
1:1 Interviews directly with users:
- I interviewed 15+ Support Engineers to understand what are their goals over a period of 4 weeks.
- The interview duration ranged up to 30 mins.
Focus groups:
- We interviewed groups of up to 4 Support Engineers (from the same company)
- We interviewed groups of up to 2 Site Admins (from the same company)
Analyze
Based on the research data:
- The following data shows user feedback for the legacy Appliance registration and appliance setup process
Based on the additional research data:
- we saw that most users prefer a simpler workflow
- A few users prefer a “step-based” registration workflow similar to the existing design
- while a small number of users do not seem to care
Ideation and Prototypes
I have created 5 different workflows/design for Appliance Registration. The goal is to identify which is more “easier”, “usable” and simple from the user’s perspective.
We reached out to multiple customers and tested these designs.
Option 3 – Page 1
Option 3 – Page 2
Option 3 – Page 3
Option 4 – A combination of tiles and list
Option 5 – A simplistic approach but with tile layout
Re-Analyze
We conducted additional user testing directly with our customers again
- while a large segment of the users initially preferred a single-page registration process, after sharing some the of “step-based” designs, quite a few users actually voted for this “step-based” design. Some of these users said it feels “more familiar”.
- Still, a larger % of users preferred a “simpler” workflow and based on the 5 different design options, 45% preferred Option-1.
- Total number of users reached was around 75, from a list of 16 different companies.
Final Design
Add New Teams
This option was missing from the older design/workflow
Add New Contacts for Support
Old design
- Cluttered interface
- Too much redundant information
To add a new Contact
New design
- Removed this “extra” step from the wizard
Show Appliance in List mode
Old Design
New Design
- Shows a quick overview at the top of the tabular data
- Shows additional data
- The table columns are draggable/movable. The columns arrangement is now based on the user profile.
Add Site
This is rarely required. In most scenarios. the user will simply select from the existing list of sites.
Old design
New Design with additional features
- Includes several new parameters
- All the original parameters were kept
- Site Requirements feature is now optional since customers do not use this feature often. They are “happy” with the default requirements.
Measure / Re-analyze / Research Analytics
We conducted contextual interviews, user testing and sent out surveys for the new appliance registration and setup process.
- The following results indicate the overall user feedback based on the analysis of user data and feedback
