Sungard Availability Services
Customer Enterprise Portal Experience
Sungard (now 11:11) creates and manages disaster-ready production and recovery systems that are highly resilient, allowing customers to compete effectively in the market with minimal to no downtime.
In short, Sungard provides disaster recovery "insurance" for data centers.
My Role
As Senior UX/UI Design Team Lead, I directed the customer portal experience, establishing a vision that won the DRaaS Leader Award from Gartner Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years. I outline the challenges faced by Sungard users and my proposed solution.
I delivered information architectures, wireframes, prototypes, feature specs, and assets for developers to visualize the user experience. We utilized Bootstrap, d3.js, React.js, ZoomCharts, and Charts.js. I worked in Illustrator & Sketch and occasionally in Sketch, using Redpen.io and InVision for collaboration. I created SVG assets and icon fonts.
I created and promoted a library of reusable components. The development team started building this library using React JS. The UX department managed and improved these components as they were developed.
OKR (Growth)
Deliver a zero to one world-class, next generation disaster recovery product increasing market-share by 35% and user utilization by 25% over the next 3 years.
UX Product Story
The Challenges
Customers dealt with five separate portals, each requiring different logins, user setups, and databases. Each had its own branding and design style. Users were unhappy with these five experiences and expressed their frustrations to their managers.
Customers How Might We statements:
How might we access a single unified portal experience, from login to app navigation, as well as a single brand vice, look and feel?
How might we influence Sungard to move beyond the traditional table design model and create more compelling and engaging experiences?
How might we create and manage server support tickets easily?
How might we see the disaster recoverability health of our data environments and server assets more predictably?
How might we manage our users and manage our portal access privileges easily?
The ANALYSIS
Many front-end frameworks are outdated and no longer supported. To improve the user experience, we decided to start fresh. We began by talking closely with the Sales team before conducting focus groups. The Product team and I held calls with existing and new customers that Sales provided. After months of gathering feedback, we gathered enough information to create user personas, journeys, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes. Initially, we planned to shut down four out of five portals, but we faced internal pushback. Product and I persuaded leadership and engineering to develop a new portal centered around the Recover to Cloud (R2C) app. Sales was actively promoting the R2C service to customers, and this new product matched the needs of users looking for a cohesive Sungard portal experience.
The SOLUTIONS
The R2C portal soft-launched its pilot for about 50 users across 20 customers. Product, myself, and Senior Service Delivery Managers helped each customer get started with the new R2C portal. After onboarding, these users gave us a lot of feedback, which we used to improve the portal. By 2016, the R2C portal became the unified portal and was released to 300 users. My goal was to create one portal with a single user experience, login, admin, database, and consistent design. This aimed to make the portal unified, scalable, modular, and modern. We addressed all of the customers “how might we” statements with suitable solutions.
The Users
Three user groups—Operators, Managers/Directors, and Executives/C-Level—required tailored portal experiences while minimizing development costs. Meeting economic goals necessitated a consistent user experience across roles with varying administrative access.
The Journey
Five distinct UX journeys previously led to user dissatisfaction. Now, a unified portal makes the user experience simpler and more enjoyable. UI elements serve a clear purpose.
The Launchboard Internal Dashboard
Challenge: There are too many home pages in different portals, making it hard to track data analytics. Users required separate PDF summaries to manage overall data metrics.
Solution: A single launchboard displaying important tools and helpful data visuals for a complete overview.
The launchboard appears right after login and loads quickly. It includes various dashlets that show data visualizations to convey the health of customer environments and their disaster recovery status. Each dashlet has a rocket icon for easy access to the related tool, addressing the common issue of users needing to switch between multiple portals. This design creates a fully unified portal for accessing tools.
The User Admin Internal Tool
Challenge: Too many disparate user admin tools across multiple portals hard to track what a user did in one admin tool versus another admin tool..
Solution: Developed a global user management tool that integrates customer and user management using a business card design. The cards flip to show more useful data for each customer and user. External users see their company profile card at the top, with registered users listed below. A dropdown search bar allows live searching of users. Clicking the folder icon opens a side panel with more details, enabling users to make changes or additions. This design pattern is also used in the R2C SR App below.
Recover to Cloud Internal Monitoring Tool
Challenge: Need a view into the disaster recoverability health of customers servers/volumes that not only engages and delights but informs and allows easy consumption of what to do next..
Solution: Delivered a colorful health monitoring tool that tracks server recovery. Recover to Cloud (R2C) Server Replication (SR) checks the recovery health of the user's production server and storage assets. It displays two main data points: CPO (Consistency Point Objective) for server health and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) for volume health. Additional information includes storage used, bandwidth, and past CPO and RPO for each server and volume.
When a user clicks on any square (server) or any circle (volume), the d3js API shows server/volume relationship in a right side panel. Motion adds a sense of activity and directs attention to key areas, keeping user focus.
The R2C portal pilot launched with around 50 users from 20 customers. The product team and Senior Service Delivery Managers assisted each customer in using the new portal. Through several PIs of iterative designs collaborating with users, the portal was expanded for 300 users across all customers.
The Server Update Internal Tool
Challenge: Provide a better way for users to update server OS's to the latest versions in order to maintain recoverability compliance with Sungard's Gold Policy. Users previously had to contact Sungard support by phone or email, often causing issues due to outdated policy files not matching their current OS. But customers would only know this IF they called in. Not good UX.
Solution: A streamlined, 3-tab tool (servers, schedule, history) solution includes a 4-step wizard for scheduling or rolling back updates easily. Each week, the app checks the user's system against the latest OS versions. If an update is needed, an alert icon appears next to the affected server as well as an email sent to user. Users can select the server(s) to access the scheduling interface. Rolling back updates follows the same process in reverse.
OKR Met with Happy Users
It took 3+ years of extensive user research, user-centered and iterative design execution along with strong development to bring Sungard’s Recovery to Cloud next generation unified portal solution to market. During this time, Sungard saw an increase marketshare by 38% and user satisfaction was 5/5 stars with an NPS of 94..
It took vision casting, new data visualization APIs, interactive prototypes, numerous white-boarding session / meetings, a plethora of user / customer focus groups / interviews to achieve the overall user experience outcome and successfully meet the business OKR.
Read below some of the customer experience portal feedback from internal and external users.
The Portal Praise
Customer portal users expressing positive feedback and gratitude with the easy-to-use, simplified, contextualized, humanistic, unified user experience.