Category Archives: BITTITAN

TIMELINE: ARCHITECTING A NEW PLATFORM




Results – Sold for 16x
Designing a new platform from the ground up in 1.5 years is hard work, but by driving design-level thinking methodologies, modern design principles, and guidelines, I was able to ship a platform that is modern, intuitive, and could be a game changer for the IT industry.

Dominic Pouzin – CTO
“Geoffrey is a very talented senior UX designer and would be a huge asset to any company, especially those with a focus on enterprise products. At BitTitan, Geoffrey helped our product UI evolve from “amateurish” to professional / on-par with top SaaS solutions. Geoffrey’s key strength is creation of new UX concepts and high-level look-and-feel experience for enterprise products.

Public Launch (GTM): 4/2017
As the lead designer (manager) I was responsible for the entire experience, I owned key platform features and once the UI Models (MVP) were in place I interviewed and hired 3 UX designers to hand off new features to quickly scale the platform. Then I turned my attention to updating the Dashboard, Delivery center, Entity management, Activity feed, Subscription billing, and 3rd party OEM task workflows.

Beta Launch:  10/2016
Among the improvements adopting the new UI-Kit were the Dashboard, Service Center, Activity feed, Subscription billing, Delivery Center, and Cost Reporting, and around 20 new IT service solutions were implemented.

Systems Library – Integration
Once a new UI kit was implemented the platform began to come to life. The new kit helped speed up design/development time since UI systems patterns and common controls were consistent across the platform. We made additional layout changes to simplify the experience by introducing detailed fly-out panels and inline accordions.

Systems Library – Redesign
One challenge was designed in an old UI kit. I knew I had to modernize the platform to help BitTitan served as a trusting SaaS application. I made it a company commitment to drive a modern UI Kit–the existing grey navigation and the overall site felt like a typical Seattle day to me. I always knew the future of the site would need to be something much more modern.

Preview Launch: 7/2016
Once the platform MVP framework was in place, it was time to start integrating new feature services and onboarding new customers to the platform. The first step is to go external and start dog fooding the product to get real customer feedback. This was an exciting time for the company to be on a fast-paced high-performance phased­ agile development team. The culture/collaboration fostered solutions for the greater company interests. BitTitans’ motto was: “Get Shit Done!”

New Feature Development: 7/2016
Once the platform MVP framework was in place, it was time to start integrating new business service workflows into the platform. One challenge was designed in an old UI kit. I knew I had to modernize the platform to help BitTitan serve as a trusting SaaS application. I started visually exploring new designs and hired a few rock-star UX designers, while we also turned our attention to designing new features such as Dashboard, Service center, Device management, OEM services, and Activity center. The product machine was in high-performance mode using remote development shipping features in 2-3-week sprints.

Alpha Platform (Customer Onboarding): 1/2016
After multiple requirement meetings, presentations, and wireframes, I designed the base platform UI model with minimal feature requirements to meet an MVP; at the same time, I was supporting a host of new services being developed on the old platform. The system had to scale for new services while App Switching (drop-menu) into MigrationWiz, Sales Automation, Deployment Pro, Data Encryption, SSO/Registration, User Management, App launcher, Purchasing, and innovating new Cloud Services.

The Big Picture (Discovery): 10/2015
Managed Services was a new concept for the company. A lot of research went into understanding the new business direction. BitTitan’s flagship product MigrationWiz (MW) had six-plus years of technology behind it, including multiple types of Migration services, Shopping Cart, Licensing, Support, SSO/rBac, and Account Management. It would be too risky for the company to build on the current MW platform to avoid service disruptions. The decision was made to create a new platform. The wireframe below shows the initial breakdown of how the two platforms could co-exist as features get migrated or re-architected.

The Business Pivot
The CEO made a business decision to leverage MigrationWiz (cash cow + partner base) and pivot the company to Managed Service Provider (MSP). This was perfect for enterprise customers needing a way to migrate to the cloud. The vision was to build a marketplace with no loyalty to any cloud environment AWS, Azure, Google, and On-Premise, which can be cross-platform migrated thus reducing service fees for large enterprise customers.  After multiple discovery meetings, presentations, and feature requests, I designed the base platform UX/UI model the Dev team was going to build using the new ember.js framework.

MigrationWiz: UX/UI Refactor
My solution is to redesign the task management workflow to be a vertical list on the left nav rail to track completed steps. The results were super successful by reducing the number of support tickets and increasing customer confidence to complete a migration. The introduction of the left nav for task management provided the baseline for future workflows for MSP Complete.

The Platform – Discovery
The original MigrationWiz functionality was a wizard-type UI model. The amount of customer confusion and support tickets was a real pain point for customer support. The platform served well (originally) as an email migration service. The UI model was never expected to scale beyond 4 keys services. The UX started to break down when new features were starting to get bolted on. I was the Team of One (UX designer), employee #36 responsible for re-architecting and modernizing the migration workflow experiences.



ENTITY MANAGEMENT / ACTIVITY FEED: AI/ML




CEO VISION
Collaborated with the CEO 1:1 to understand the big picture, then I was able to translate those visions visually to the team. At a high level, we needed to build a proactive/reactive notification system for enterprise customers to analyze their end-user entities’ using AI/ML technologies.

The recommendation engine would scan/analyze the data at scale for security issues, threat analysis, sensitive data, compliance, viruses, etc. The heart and soul of the MSP Complete system made it easy for IT to deploy remote automated services that are under management.
The press had early access to the platform. View

Activity Feed: The business vision was to have hundreds of services deployed remotely. The activity feed would be the first responder for IT professionals who can deploy a remote solution.

Customer Journey – Mapping
My process was designed to maximize communications with developers. I created UX/UI journey maps to walk developers through the interaction process. This approach helps to speed up the collaboration process.

Customer Feedback – MVE Learnings
My original feed design was rough by necessity but flexible, allowing the team to focus on more important features. We had to ship with an MVP product, which was an amalgam of all individual feed types and events. This is agile thinking — recognizing you can’t expect to build everything, or we would never ship. One apparent feature was that similar feed types needed to be grouped to help with scale issues.

Concept Iterations – Low-Fidelity Mocks
Through multiple whiteboard sessions, the dev team was able to grasp a holistic view which helped synthesize the product features. Through collaboration, the team was able to understand the fundamental requirements before stories were created.

Discovery Phase:
I created this high-level user flow to align the UI with the customer journey to visually represent the initial product feature goals.

Activity Feed – Diagram Flow
Once an IT partner customer adds users and devices from Entity Management the platform will notify the IT professional with proactive/reactive types of notifications. The Activity feed would be the backbone for IT specialists on how to take action. I created high-level user flows to help the team understand the data flow.





Entity Management – Users/Devices


OVERVIEW
As lead designer one of the most important features of the managed service platform is the ability to view customer insights remotely to take advantage of the platform’s full capabilities. New services will be reflected in the platform once you add an entity (user or computer), the platform will analyze the customer data to be used for the suggestion engine.

USER INSIGHTS — CHART VIEW 
From the user list management, an IT customer can quickly view user metadata details to evaluate what actions to perform on a device and other relevant data. The customer feedback was great since they don’t have to drill down to another level to view all relevant data. As a shortcut (Inventive), I added another chart panel to quickly see how many consumers have the heartbeat app (device agent) running, or other issues instead of drilling down to another page.



Customer Profile Management
Once the DMA was successfully deployed to a customer’s device the IT can perform simple tasks on the customer’s computer. The business vision was to support 100’s micro-services for IT professionals can perform system analysis. The DMA could be considered running in the background monitoring the heartbeat of a customer’s device. Using AI/ML an IT professional can receive Proactive or Reactive alerts letting them know how to remediate. In the UX/UI, I added different types of fly-in panels to prevent the customer from drilling down to another page.



Task Launcher – Full Modal Experience
Once a customer chooses a path to migrate the customer’s users the task launcher opens in a full modal experience showing the simple steps to complete the required tasks. BitTitan’s target market is customers such as universities who have 40k users that need to migrate from Office 365 to Gmail or vice versa. The Overview is the first step which gives clear customer guidance and a video tutorial showing how easy it is to deploy the DMA agent.



Device Management Agent – Empty State Since I designed the deployment agent (DMA) application it made sense for me to design the user invite workflow on how to set up and deploy the agent from the platform. The platform can remotely install the agent using GPO, Connectors, DeviceAgent.exe, or installed from an inbox email.



Results — The redesign increased the customer success rate by around 80%. I thought it would be a nice touch to add a little bit of eye candy (.gif animation) to let the user know the app is running during the configuration process since the process takes time to mirror and migrate the customer’s profile to the cloud.





The Design Challenge
DMA was developed as a universal shell app (C++) to be compatible with any type of OS, I was tasked to redesign the client app to improve the customer journey to be user-friendly. Trying to push the design… but being limited due to the app’s language limitations. I worked with a Dev 1:1 to recreate the status tracker progression and some visual animation to ease the customer the DMA was configuring the services on a customer’s machine.









The Beginning – Overview
A Device Management Agent (DMA) is the quickest and easiest way to remotely deploy and configure software applications on end users’ desktops or mobile devices without an IT physically touching the computer. DMA helps companies of all sizes deploy new software applications remotely or it can migrate mailboxes with a few simple user tasks.

Deployment Pro (DMA):  Before – After
The original Deployment Pro, remote client agent looked like some type of malware, with a high customer drop-off rate due to the customer thinking they have some type of malware.