Customer Creation Redesign for Webex Partner Hub
Overview
Webex Partners contribute to 94% of Webex sales, with Partner Hub being the portal where they’re able to track and manage their customers’ Webex settings and services.
A country selection bug found in Partner Hub’s customer creation wizard that led to organizations having incorrect configurations set on their network and negatively impacting the end user’s overall experience with Webex services.
In response, I redesigned the customer creation experience such that it proactively handles errors in the wizard and ensures country selection consistency in each step.
Role: Product Designer
Tools: Figma, Jira, Webex
Process stages: Competitive Analysis, Heurisitic Evaluation, Initial Design Solution, Iteration, High-fidelity Mockups
When: October - November 2022
Client: Webex Partners
The Current State of the Partner Hub Customer Creation Wizard
Stakeholder discussions revealed that there was no validation preventing a mismatch in the country selection data between steps. As a result, customer organizations could have multiple location configurations set on their network, resulting in network and latency issues when using Webex services.
“ASK: The Country field within the Headquarters setup should be prepopulated with the Template selection and changing it should display a warning. The current setup allows me to create a template that is US focused with CCPP however I provision the customer to the EMEA platform on the HQ screen.”
I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the current customer creation flow based on NNG Usability Heuristics and found additional problem constraints to consider:
Lack of error prevention measures: There are currently no error-prevention measures when a mismatching country is selected.
Users forced to recall info: It is not clear to a partner what the original country selection is in the previously-made template.
Lack of consistency and standards: The two conflicting country selections are both required:
In the Template Creation Wizard, it determines PSTN Carrier selections.
In the Headquarter’s location screen, it determines the cluster a customer is provisioned on.
There are 2 types of customer creation flows for the 2 Headquarter’s location screens.
UX Goals to Update the Country Selection Validation
After brainstorming sessions with multiple designers on the Partner Hub team, my strategy was to promote:
Error prevention and recovery: Help partners recover from errors and proactively prevent them.
Consistency and visibility: Country selection data should remain clear and consistent through the customer creation from template to final review.
Initial Design Solutions for the Country Selection Validation
I initially considered 3 options for improving the country selection validation: toasts, inline messages, and making the country selection field read-only and prepopulating it.
Option 1: Toasts
Toasts are great for presenting short information in real time, such as the country selection error message I was trying to implement, but faced concerns with insufficient error-handling and reactive validation.
Option 2: Inline Message
While inline messages improved the visual hiearchy by grouping the error message with the input where the error was occuring on the screen, the validation was still only be performed after a partner attempted to navigate to the next step in the wizard. Additionally, suggesting an error recovery solution began to cramp the text up against other fields.
Option 3: Make field read-only and prepopulate it
By making the country selection input field read-only prevents partners from incorrectly modifying of the country selection.
In addition, prepopulating the country selection field based on the value in the customer template chosen earlier in the wizard, we proactively prevent mismatching data throughout the flow.
After several design reviews, stakeholders felt Option 3 was the strongest option since it proactively prevented errors due to mismatching data or incorrect country selection changes. Options 1 and 2 helped with clarifying the error, but fell short due to reactive validations and insufficient error-handling.
Although Option 3 resolved the validation concerns in the wizard, stakeholders were concerned that partners were still having to recall every country that was selected in previously created templates. As a result, I looked to update the wizard to reduce the cognitive load on partners when selecting a template.
Updated Validation and Customer Creation Flow
Based on stakeholder feedback and several iterations, I focused on to update the flow by minimizing the information a partner has to recall while still preventing errors as a result of conflicting country data.
By updating the Customer Information screen, the first step of the wizard. This way, a partner is now first required to choose a country selection in a dropdown field. This selection would trigger the Templates dropdown with the options filtered by the country selected.
As a result, the country selection is clearer to partners before having to select a required template.
Additionally, if there are no templates for a country selection, we guide partners to where they can create one.
From there, the country selection field on the Headquarters location screens would autofill based on the previously selected option and be set to read-only to prevent accidental modifications.
If they need to update the country selection, they only have to update it in one place, the Customer Information screen, and it will reflect everywhere else.
Outcomes and Future Steps
With the updated country selection validation and error-handling measures, the customer creation wizard is made more robust and easier to use.
Proactive error handling ensures country selection data is consistent, and making the field read-only prevents partners from incorrectly modifying the field in one place only.
More in-context support notifyies partners on how to quickly diagnose, and recover, from errors when templates are unavailable right away.
Reduce the cognitive effort required from partners by only having the available templates options filtered by the country a partner selects in the first step of the wizard.
If I had more time to work on this feature enhancement, a consideration I would keep in mind during the next iteration of this solution is allowing easier navigation back to the Customer Templates screen from the wizard.
Currently, we only allow partners to navigate back to the Customer Templates screen if there are no templates and they want to create a new one.
This feature enhancement is now in production for Webex Partner Hub.
