Adaptiva’s Endpoint Health redesign
Overview
Adaptiva's Endpoint Health is a product to manage the compliance of devices at a business. The purpose of the redesign was to bring Endpoint Health into the Adaptiva web portal from a desktop application. I also reduced the complexity of the UI and designed dashboards to provide customers with full visibility into the compliance state of their endpoints. The development of this project was executed in four phases:
Background
Company
Adaptiva is a Kirkland, WA based company that provides endpoint management products for businesses to easily distribute content to and monitor compliance of endpoints.
Problem
Endpoint Health is a product provided by Adaptiva that will check for and fix problems related to the health, compliance, and security of devices. The original desktop application had a very complex UI and did not provide results reporting. This deterred many customers from trying to use the application on their own and they relied heavily on the solutions team for assistance.
Project goal
The goal of this project was to create an approachable experience by moving product functionality from the old desktop application to the new web application and providing visibility into the compliance state of endpoints.
Role and responsibilities
As the only product designer at Adaptiva, I worked with product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders to see this project from concept to development. I conducted heuristic evaluations and SME interviews, created prototypes to review with stakeholders, and worked with engineering teams during development.
Process
Research
The main source of research for this project was from interviews with support and sales staff. These interviews helped me to build relationships with support and sales staff and collect insights about the sales process and support involvement with customers. I learned that the support staff is heavily involved in the setup of Endpoint Health because of the unnecessary complexity of the product flow. Using data from my interviews, I created personas for the IT administrators who use our products and the support staff as power users. Ideally, I would have conducted in-depth interviews with current customers who use Endpoint Health but did not have the time or resources.
Prototype
After conducting preliminary research and developing personas, I created an interactive prototype using Adobe XD. Looking back at this project I learned that I should try to incorporate real example data to make experiences as real as possible for testing and reviews.
Review
During the review stage, I got feedback from engineers on the feasibility of my designs, worked with support to fine-tune important data points, and obtained approval from upper management. In the future, I would like to conduct usability tests with our customers to improve designs and experience flows.
Engineering handoff
After a few rounds of internal reviews and iteration, I created a final high-fidelity interactive prototype to handoff to the engineering team. I worked with the engineering team to ensure design consistency in the final product. After development and during the testing phase, I received a lot of feedback about the experience that I would have ideally wanted to address before development. To prevent this in the future, I would create prototypes with real data and conduct review sessions with scenarios to spark a more realistic flow with stakeholders providing feedback.
Solution
The following are designs and features from my solution that I would like to highlight:
Dashboards for visibility into compliance state
Endpoint Health previously did not provide a way to view results and this left customers frustrated. The support team built out reports in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to address this issue, but customers often forgot they existed and did not use them. For the redesign, I created an overview dashboard that provides overall compliance state information with drill-down capabilities for statistics to allow IT administrators to find a specific problem. Detail dashboards are also accessible from the table to provide overall data for a specific device, group, check, etc. Including dashboards and reporting within the product UI ensures that our customers will know where to look for results.
Improved navigation
Before: In the desktop application perspectives were used to manage different views and it was difficult to access other items after selecting a perspective. Furthermore, users had difficulty determining which perspective fit their current needs.
After: I created a side navigation menu to use an easily recognizable navigation pattern. I also simplified the navigation menu items to make it easier to determine what to select.
Reworked browsing experience
To accommodate a very large number of objects like 100+ health checks, I utilized a split folder and table view. Selecting a folder will populate the table with only the objects within the folder. I also provided the option to view all objects and use search functionality if a user knows what they are looking for. This interaction is not a common pattern within consumer products, but I took inspiration from ConfigMgr, a commonly used IT tool.
Reworked editing experience
Heuristics evaluations revealed a form editing experience with wordy and complex labels, inconsistent hierarchy in form fields, and lack of status indication. I designed new and concise labels to replace wordy labels and information signposts were added for fields that required more explanation. To make the form more digestible I also organized form fields into groups using cards.