PGi: Admin Portal Phone Settings

PGi: Admin Portal Phone Settings

Project Overview

PGi is a UCaaS (Unified Collaboration as a Service) provider offering meeting, phone and device, and virtual event software to organizations and individuals.

The mission at PGi is that with the UCaaS solution, businesses simplify their operations, gain flexibility to scale, improve user support and reduce the cost of both communications and collaboration.

The challenge of this project: A customer admin who lacks confidence about assigning a phone number or device to a user needs to be sure that they correctly complete the task but faces uncertainty of where to start in the system.

Project Details

My Role:
UX Designer & Research Lead

The Team:
UX Designer, Director of Design, Product Owner, Development Team, QA Team

The Timeline:
1 month

Primary Tools & Resources:
Object-Oriented UX (OOUX), UserTesting, Sketch, Figma Prototyping, Design System

Admin Portal Research & Personas

WIthin the PGi's UCaaS solution, there are many types of administrators with different needs. The one we focused on for this project was the IT Director, Ben Keyser.

IT Director Persona: Ben Keyser

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Trends from User Research on Administrators

Inform

  • Managing users, editing permissions, extensions, checking call logs, looking at billing, route calls and voicemails, more tasks

Troubleshoot

  • Troubleshooting issues or errors with services before calling customer service

Optimization

  • Shortcuts to things I do frequently
  • Automate as many processes as possible
  • Easy, smart, global way to search for what I need
  • Intuitive, user friendly way to make changes

Curated Control

  • Customizable dashboard with usage statistics on the home screen (birds eye view)
  • See what is being used within the company (usage)
  • Shortcuts to things I do frequently
  • Resurface of things I’ve done before (history)
  • Manage the telephone system
  • Intuitive, user friendly way to make changes (update)

Poor Organization / IA

  • Disorganized content and no clear path to task completion
  • Clumsy user interface and organization of portal
  • Clicking around aimlessly through content wasting time trying to find what I need
  • Steep learning curve (too much time investment)
  • I can’t remember what I did last time to complete this task
  • Accidentally or unknowingly making a change I did not intend to make because I was confused or found the wrong information
  • Having a low level of confidence that I’ve completed what I set out to do

Determining Phone Setting Relationships

After exploring the existing solution, we weren’t confident in how administrators would expect to assign users, phone numbers, and devices to one another.

Open-Ended Usability Test

We set up a usability test using our standard “Portal Administrator” screeners to ensure our testers matched our needs.

In order to see how administrator’s would make assignments, our prototype was fairly open-ended with multiple ways that a user could assign users, phone numbers, and devices.

Our goals for this usability test were to:

  • Validate admins can reassign phone elements (phone number, device, extension) from one user to another.
  • Validate that upon reassignment of phone number, admins understand that nothing else is reassigned.

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Result of the Usability Test

We found that ALL testers (5/5) went through each user for their assignments. This was the least efficient way of reassigning numbers or devices because it required the tester to unassign a used number or device from one user in order to reassign it to another user.

Therefore, we decided that instead of requiring admins to unassign a phone number prior to assigning it, they could assign a phone number that’s already been assigned to someone — which would automatically unassign it from the original person

Streamlining the Reassignment Process

Now that we had our updated prototypes to allow for testers to assign phone numbers that were already assigned, we set our expectations for the next usability test.

Reassignment of Numbers and Devices Usability Test

Our hypotheses for this usability test were:

  • By displaying the current assignment of a device or phone number that's assigned to a user, it provides admins confirmation that they're doing what's intended.
  • By displaying the current assignment as "None" for an unassigned device or phone number, it provides the admins with confirmation that this is the correct device/number they want to assign.

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The Feedback

The comments we received from phone administrators in our test were INCREDIBLE! They validated our initial research findings and were blown away by how intuitive our solution was!

Because we were using UserTesting.com, we were able to compile the positive feedback into a short highlight reel that we then shared and celebrated with the rest of the team over!

Extremely easy to use, fast, quick. So easy to assign and unassign numbers and extensions — even to switch users that have already been assigned... I've worked with a lot of systems and I like this MUCH better!

- Ring Central User

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Next Steps and Lessons Learned

This project was a roaring success and gave us a lot of momentum to tackle the rest of the Phone Settings in the Admin Portal.

Next Steps

  • Onto the next section of the Admin Portal — E911 settings — with stronger team communication and newfound momentum!

Lessons Learned

  • Dev & QA were in the loop with testing & plans throughout the project so they had already planned how they would build and test the features. No surprises once we handed designs over to them!
  • Including complexity from the beginning helped show that our final design was well executed
  • Creating highlight reels from UserTesting really helped capture how well we had done with our Administrator screener from the beginning. We had real administrators from our real competitors raving about this feature and how much time it would save them!

More UX Work

Built with by Amanda Worthington
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