The new Self-Service Dashboard

Active Users Grow to 18%

in collaboration with:

Jr. UX Designer,
Sr. UX Researcher,
Head of Design,
User Assistance Writer,
2 Directors of Product Development,
Development team,
Integrations team,
SVP of Technology,
Product Manager,
Data Analyst,
Support team,
Sales team, and
QA team

My role: UX lead
The business: SAP is a global vendor of enterprise resource planning software.
Project duration: September 2022 - May 2023

The old Self-Service Dashboard that lacks a header. Instead of a grid, it arranges the tiles by category in vertical sections.

The Self-Service Dashboard is a powerful tool.

And it comes with a ton of responsibility. It's supposed to be a place where users known as Configuration Managers can set up and monitor integrations and maintain successful data transfer between SAP products and non-SAP products.

While customers desired the independence, most customers refused to adopt the Self-Service Dashboard because it looked difficult in sales demos, leading to an overburdened Support team left to manage integrations on customers' behalf.

Diagram showing that the UX team was actively connected to other departments, but the Integrations team functioned like a mysterious silo.

But it was owned by the reclusive Integrations team.

Prior to September 2022, they had not collaborated with a UX designer in 5 years!

The Sales and Support teams informed me about customer feedback, how it looked unattractive in product demos and how customers needed assistance with basic tasks.

So the UX team reached out.

A bar graph titled "Tool Usage Across Configuration Managers." It lists nearly two dozen tools along the x-axis, with 73.3% for the tool called "Enable Connector." The rest of the tools descend from 7.24% to 0.03%.

The work would require building trust and leaning on subject matter experts.

The Integrations team understood the Sales and Support teams' struggles and welcomed the UX team's collaboration in improving the dashboard experience.

They shared about their knowledge of Configuration Managers, usage at the time, features, history of the dashboard, and the product roadmap.

A grid of 20 wireframes going from low to higher fidelity.

My junior design partner and I drafted wireframes informed by the data.

We landed on three initiatives for the redesign:

Bring actionable content to the surface.
Tailor based on user behavior.
Guide the user with educational information.

My teammate's concept and mine side by side. They are similar in the data visualization panels but differ in their arrangement of the tools/links. My partner organized them into a grid, ordered alphabetically. I organized the content in three columns--the data visualization in the middle and the tools/links in separate groups on the left and right sides.

my partner's design (left) vs mine (right)

Our ideas diverged and resulted in two concepts.

We delivered the same content, but which design better supports Configuration Managers' goals and behaviors?

A videostill from a usability session conducted on Microsoft Teams. It shows the faces of the UX researcher and two participants.

So we conducted preference testing with six clients.

Earlier in the project, we had consulted with a UX researcher for any discovery needs, but the opportunities for improvement were clear at the beginning--we just needed to test how users would respond to our proposed concepts.

Our goal for the study was to understand Configuration Managers' relationship with the dashboard.

4 user quotes pointing at different parts of one concept. Overall, they mention how the new interface is more useful and approachable.

The research unearthed greater value than we initially understood.

Based on the feedback, we decided that users' needs would be better served by my teammate's concept which arranged the tools in an equitable grid, gave space to descriptions, and highlighted the tools they were using.

A widget for surfacing integration activity so that users can quickly address them. It contains tabs for categories of integration types and a horizontal bar chart to show integration statuses.

Zoom in: the value of saving time

We discovered that users had to wait for colleagues to inform them that the system was broken. The new design made integration statuses visible upfront, empowering users to solve integration problems proactively.

This information was previously available but buried under tables of data.

A new "Recently Visited" section that lists users' last used tools. Each tool is represented as a tile with a new heading, description, and category tag.

Zoom in: the value of mitigating fear

Updated headings and succinct descriptions instantly made the dashboard feel more approachable, so that users could explore the tools more freely.

This surprised us the most--that multiple users said they were afraid of the tools for lack of information.

The iteration of the Self-Service Dashboard that was build for the May 2023 release. It is very similar to my teammate's concept but without the data visualization section.

We overcame hurdles to launch the redesign.

This new design almost got deferred, but we gathered so much ammo from the research sessions and relayed to stakeholders how necessary and useful the new Self-Service Dashboard could be--not just for Configuration Managers, but for the Sales and Support teams too.

We reached a compromise. Development resources were allocated to build part of our design, but the data visualization component had to wait for a later release.

A line graph titled "Change in the Percentage of Users Who Logged in Monthly." The y values range from 0% to 20%, and the x values go from January to September. The line drops from 12% in January to under 10% in May, then climbs up to over 18% in September.

Epilogue: adoption grew, a silo was broken.

From May to September, in terms of login activity, the percent of Configuration Managers who were monthly active users grew from 10% to 18%.

Cross-functional teams also benefitted:

The User Assistance team wrote updated guides in response to users' pain points.
The Support team reported no increase in integration-related cases despite the increase in Configuration Managers.
The Sales team reported improved presentations, and the business overshot its renewal and new client booking goals by 9% at the end of the year.
I became the designated UX lead for 16+ additional Self-Service feature enhancements.

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