Company
Flexera
Year
2021
Type
Interaction Design
SaaS Manager North Star
Flexera delivers SaaS-based IT management solutions that enable enterprises to accelerate and multiply the return on their technology investments. Flexera informs their IT with total visibility into their complex hybrid ecosystems, providing the IT insights that fuel better-informed decisions.
Flexera One is a SaaS-based IT management solution designed with and for organizations with highly complex hybrid environments. With Flexera One, user can visualize the entire estate and make data-driven IT decisions from on-premises to SaaS to the cloud.
Unify, standardize, simplify & delight how users of Flexera are using SaaS Manager application. Provide User Experience north star which can help set the right course of Product and Engineering direction. Provide direction in a way that SaaS Manager north star can eventually meet Flexera One North Star.
Identify the needs of potential customers to enhance the SaaS Manager platform.
Challenges of SaaS Manager UX
Fragmented UX
Not centered around users needs
Disparate Data sources
Data refreshing time
Broken Information Architecture
Below bar with competition
Research Goals
The Flexera UX team conducted remote interviews with customers and partners to:
- Understand customer and partner goals, challenges and current behaviors.
- Validate use case hypothesis and understand which are most desirable.
Research Initiative
Their current processes
Observed how they use tools today
Gathered feedback on design stimuli for 7 use case categories
Invited them to co-create a dashboard
Methods and Stimuli
HYPOTHESIS
Use Case Areas
We presented stimuli based on all 7 use cases.
A majority of participants said the stimuli for each use case would improve their workflow, and zero said it would worsen.
After asking customers, partners, and internal stakeholders to prioritize their top features and use cases, the priorities were the same:”
1. App License View
2. App Detail
3. Workspace
4. User View
5. Onboarding & Off boarding
6. Custom License
7. Integration Management View
8. Information Architecture
Principles
Demostrate Value
SaaS users’ expectations depend on their organizations maturity. For some, SaaS is in its infancy, and not all players have the necessary knowledge and are bought in. Customers expect a holistic service to continuously
demonstrate SaaS Manager value.
Provide Flexibility
Design for the flexibility of all users by empowering individuals to configure presentations and set rules to receive relevant data and insights.
Highlight Opportunities
Users are navigating a sea of data and need help sorting through it all. They expect recommended opportunities that are backed by logic and guide
them to optimized savings.
My Role
As part of the UX team, my responsibilities included partnering with UX Researchers and Product Managers to evaluate what problems we need to solve for our users, identifying key focus points for iteration and creating solutions to those problems to deliver an intuitive user experience.
USER VIEW
A view that allows customers to see data from the lens or their users.
Many customer roles require user-specific tasks. The Users page lets customers see all users in their environment from different views so they can take acfon.
“I like that you have it broken into the different categories up top with suspicious and underutilized.”
Peter S.
Solution Specialist, Software One
ONBOARDING & OFFBOARDING
A guided experience for helping customers setup and reclaim employee licenses.
Onboarding and off boarding are a challenge. These guided experiences make it easy to take acfon from assigning new licenses to reclaiming and revoking users.
“If there’s a wave of new interns, this would be useful for getting them all set up.”
Bryant C.
Global SAM Program Manager, Proctor & Gamble
