3700+

User Surveys

4

Usability Sessions

10%

PSAT Increase

Client Background

Customer Connect is a centralized platform used each week by more than 90k customers to access product documentation, training materials, troubleshooting guides, and open / manage support requests.

I collaborated with VMware’s Digital Experience team to audit their dashboard portal, refine the UX, and design a solution that intuitively guides customers to the specific functions they need, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience.

Audit

The Digital Experience team recognized the need for a website update, prompting me to begin noting my impressions of the portal. My preliminary thoughts on the identified issues:

1. Lacks relevant, personalized information and fails to guide users on next steps.
2. Usability and functionality issues hinder task completion.
3. Difficult-to-navigate interface requiring excessive clicks to find information
4. Key features are missing or difficult to locate

Initial Research

Insights to features

In intital prototypes, we prioritized content that was deemed most important to customers that was determined by user surveys, website analytics and internal stakeholders. After analyzing survey results and observing FullStory sessions, we identified the main features to include on the dashboard.

After analyzing the data, this helped inform our must have features: 
- Actionable alerts & notifications
- Key action shortcuts
- Support request display
- Chatbot to access shortcuts for support flows
- Product support shortcuts to KB pages
- Quick actions links
- Success plan details

Future State Features:
- Products and licenses details
- Subscriptions
- Learning modules

Defining the framework

In defining the framework, we considered principles and visual presentation ensuring that it adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes and devices. Keeping this in mind, we've designed the layout to prioritize these needs, ensuring that over 80% of essential tasks are conveniently accessible without the need for scrolling, all placed prominently above the fold.

Research

To better understand how users behave on our new homepage design, we conducted 4 usability sessions and structured interviews with customers to garner insightful feedback and validate the designs. Customers roles included IT Infrastructure Managers, Virtualization and Infrastructure Admins, and a Virtualization Engineering Lead with experience using Customer Connect varying from 5-20 years.

What we wanted to learn:
Customer feedback on the new UI of Customer Connect Homepage
Preferences for getting support
Mental models for support flows
Other flows that could be impacted by the redesign

Our hypotheses:
- Users experience friction navigating the current homepage since it does not surface relevant information to them. They lack an informative way to find their products, licenses, and manage their account. By improving the homepage and leveraging useful information relevant to their accounts, we hope to improve the user experience.
- Support - Users find it difficult to understand how to get support on Customer Connect currently. By optimizing support request widgets and designing self-support features, we hope it alleviates the support process.

Customer Learnings

Solution

After synthesizing survey results and incorporating feedback from our usability testing sessions, we identified the most common tasks users visit the site for: tracking licenses, opening and managing support requests, and downloading products. Our goal was to surface these key actions more prominently, reducing the need for users to search for them.

By addressing pain points highlighted in testing, we aimed to remove obstacles and streamline the experience, enabling users to complete their tasks more efficiently.

Bringing Key Actions to Surface

After learning users were overwhelmed by the number of widgets displayed and lack of visual hierarchy, we simplified the design by limiting the number of widgets and using consistent visual treatment.

We refreshed the quick links UI to allow customers to easily complete their most common tasks, providing customization to add/ change widgets displayed based on their personal needs.

Leveraging AI 

We incorporated popular self-service topics to allow users to find a solution quickly and reduce the number of support tickets.

Using a chatbot experience, clicking into each topic would present details related to the customer’s entitlement account and products to improve efficiency in finding a solution.

Highlighting Actionable Alerts

We reconfigured the notifications section, surfacing actionable alerts that require timely attention from customers.

Using the data from surveys and interviews, we displayed action alerts that were of importance to customers.

Success Plan Gamification

In this redesign, we wanted to surface a comprehensive success offering (Success 360) to help guide enrolled customers through all of the stages of their VMware solutions.

User’s with Success360 access would see an overview on their dashboard with personalized guidance to drive adoption and outcomes.