Admin Onboarding

Industry

Goal

Team

Enterprise SaaS / Developer Productivity

Improve usability and the first 10 minutes experience of using Cortex

1 Product Designer

Pain points

Admins have to install several integrations that require credentials and API keys. Also there are required integration types and recommended integrations that are known to the Cortex team but that information is not available in product. Usability for first time users was a constant complaint and led to several support tickets. Some users even mentioned they preferred the experience from Cortex’s main competitor.

Goals

1. Introduce onboarding and empty states

2. Validate admin user flow

3. Improve product usability

4. Introduce new design system and navigation

Design

The first version of the design proposed two approaches for onboarding, a walkthrough of several pages vs a single page guide. Both approaches proposed a specific flow of tasks to be completed by an admin in the first 10 minutes of using the product. A series of components were designed to be reusable and provided some hierarchy to highlight calls to action. A new navigation system was also introduced to address scaling issues and support workflows for different product areas.

User research

A total of 9 participants were interviewed. The candidates were all internal employees with job responsibilities that are customer facing. A script outlining key questions accompanied an interactive prototype that the participants clicked through in each session. Feedback from each interview was aggregated into a report that was shared with the company along with next iteration of design.

Key Findings

01

There are a few integrations that should always be configured first as sources for importing services. These services provide a foundation for creating scorecards. All other integrations are optional and can vary between different organizations.

02

The developer portal page is widely viewed a valuable page when it is populated however, admins struggle to get a workspace set up. This results in an empty developer portal with no guidance on how to make use of the platform.

03

After scorecards are created, there are several differing opinions about what users should be doing next. Options include inviting teammates, viewing reports, or assigning service owners.

04

The new proposed navigation design was preferred to the existing navigation for its ease of use scalability.

Strategy

This phase of design focused on incorporating the feedback collected during user research. The onboarding flow was centered around an onboarding landing page that guides users through the updated setup flow. This page would serve as a landing page for any customers that have not completed the recommended steps to get the most out of the Cortex platform.

Several optimizations were implemented including the addition of helpful links and resources placed in context, establishing key integrations that are required to configure, adding tags to integrations, and some general UI elements were cleaned up.

Onboarding

Users logging in for the first time are shown a brief introductory modal highlighting a few key values of the product and are prompted to visit a landing page that guides users through the recommended steps for setting up a Cortex workspace. The onboarding page also includes links to tutorials and persists until the tasks are complete. This ensures a valuable first experience for developers that are invited to the workspace and introduced to the developer portal.

Empty states

The product had several dead ends in which screens were empty with no calls to action, guidance, or any way for users to learn about the features. These empty states were designed, using new components, to include clear calls to action with helpful links to documentation and placed relevant tutorials in context during initial set up. Individual services had a more dynamic empty state that would could easily be modified depending on the status of the service and/or the customer’s most used integrations.

Retrospective

One area to explore further is the flow for inviting teammates. While developers are usually invited after the workspace is set up by the admin, some customers prefer to invite additional admins as collaborators to help with the initial setup. However, while there are integrations for inviting other team members, there were no role assignments at the time which made adding collaborators a tedious process. A flow that provides users the flexibility to invite individuals or teams via integration would be a beneficial addition to this design.

This project generated a lot of interest from the support team, sales engineering, and customer success representatives that felt this work would reduce workload and the number of support tickets that customers have been filing. Next steps would have involved conversations with a few select customers, however while the project was of interest to the CEO, the CTO de-prioritized this initiative and then decided not to invest any further resources.

Things can change quickly in a fast pace start up environment and unfortunately this project got lost in the mix. The biggest takeaway from this experience was the value of strong product leadership and experience which was not present. Hopefully this work will get picked up and shipped by the engineering team soon.