Just because your customers have
learned how to use you product,
does not make it a good experience.
The License Management tool provides VMware customers the ability to manage and organize their licenses freely based on what works best for their organization. The tool is vital in making sure customers can stay organized and informed with as many have 20+ plus products and 100s or 1Ks of individual license keys to track.
Jakob's Law
Jakob's Law states that users spend most of their time on other sites. That's why they prefer sites that work the same way as all the other sites.
The Problem
The initial ask was to simply perform a UI cleanup of the tool. Upon spending a little time with the tool the team quickly realized there were many interactions and functions that surprised us with behaviors we did not expect. It didn't take long to get the feeling that with each flow we could not predict what would happen or where we would end up. This was a problem!
Understand & Iterate
01 > Contextual Inquiry
The goal of the initial interviews were to simply observe the users interacting with the tool and better understand their process/pain/pleasure within the tool.
02 > Prototype
The team put together some high level designs based off the initial interviews with proposed improvements. We wanted to quickly understand if we were headed in the right direction.
03 > Iterate & Test Again
After analyzing the insights from round one we made some quick iterations. We also began consulting our engineering partners to ensure both the frontend and backend feasibility of our solutions.
Customer Driven Decisions
Before
1 - The left folder nav didn't match standard web patterns. We updated it to behave like 99% of web-based file browsers, making onboarding far less complicated.
2 - The old search required pre-selecting a result type and an exact name match. We removed the pre-selection so results return everything found — making it a true search, not just a find.
3 - Research showed users frequently needed to find products eligible for an upgrade or downgrade. A quick toggle made this effortless.
4 - The legacy system created an "Order_" folder for every new order. Since most users moved products out, empty folders piled up. Because backend changes weren't feasible, we gave users the ability to quickly hide them.
Key Takeaways
A learned experience
Most VMware customers have been users for many years. They have learned how to navigate and game most of the experiences and portals. Doing usability tests of the current experience would not yield the results we needed because they had adapted and come to accept it for what it was. Once we understood their workflows and objectives we created prototypes on what we felt would be an improvement. This was an exercise of throw some things out there and see what gets traction. This proved to be extremely valuable as users quickly realized what they had been accustomed to was quite painful.
How would you solve this
As this was my first effort after joining VMware I quickly began to learn the dynamics of an international team that had managed this product for over 10 years. Our first roadblock was helping our Product Owners and Engineers understand why we were making changes. This was met with some resistance so I quickly reset to develop a new strategy. We began involving our partners in the research sessions, making sure they had an opportunity to ask questions. The next step was to stop handing over design solutions but rather bring the team together to begin ideating together. This was a huge step in the right direction!
Cross-functional alignment
After we began problem solving collaboratively with our Product Owners and Engineers they became vested and motivated. On one occasion when we were improving the search capabilities our engineers became very cautious about performance, and rightfully so. They enthusiastically volunteered to create some POCs to understand the impact so we could confidently move in the right direction. In just 24 hours we had a working POC that we could measure the performance impacts.
Feedback
"The new experience has provided substantial time savings to our deployment and management process."
~Customer - U.S. Dept of Defense
"With my 10k folders to manage across Comcast the new search is a game changer. Now can we work on notes?"
~Customer - Comcast
"The steps to upgrade my licenses is 100% better than what it was"
~Joachim Heppner - Sanofi