Telstra: Designing for enterprise product integration
Company:
Telstra Enterprise
Project context
OVERVIEW
What is this?
Over the years Telstra had built up a number of different tools to enable Network Engineers to do their jobs. SD-WAN is a tool that can do a range of functions (each of which has a portal) - Telstra was interested in mapping out a customer experience journey for how SD-WAN would be used by customers. This case study represents my work in that discovery process.
DETAILS
My role:
User research, Prototyping, Service design, Enterprise competitor analysis
Impacts
Facilitation and synthesis for 3 user testing sessions
High fidelity prototype
Design handover
Constraints
3 month deadline
View Designs
Introduction
Imagine yourself as a software engineer
Your responsibilities are…
Implement security measures to protect the network from threats
Monitors and maintains network performance and security.
Troubleshoots connectivity issues and optimizes systems.
Your pain points with Telstra are…
I need to use a bespoke portal per task, resulting in a dozen different portals I need to use and learn. \
This makes my workflow convoluted, with multiple browsers and tabs open.
It's hard to onboard new people to help me use these tools and it doesn't scale well.
How this negatively impacts Telstra…
You have difficulty meeting your KPIs due to our clunky tools.
When your manager asks you about pain points, you cite our sofware.
The enterprise partner sales representative for your company decides to find an alternative to Telstra software, and you personally have a strong negative association with Telstra Enterprise brand experience and software.
Telstra Connect and SD-WAN
Telstra Enterprise was a digital transformation project aiming to modernize our software offerings for network maintenance technology to our users.
The primary goals of Telstra Connect were:
1 seamless experience for all network management needs
The removal of outdated portal experiences
Modernizing user testing
What's SD-WAN?
SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) is a technology that enables organizations to securely connect and manage their networks over long distances, using software to control traffic and optimize performance.
How does it relate to all this?
It would enable Telstra to streamline multiple outdated portals into a single platform, consolidating the functionality of several tools and addressing a major user pain point.
It was a long requested software piece for Telstra Enterprise partner staff.
User Testing
Example questions
Included to give an idea of the kind of customer I'm looking for:
What is your job title:
‣ Network engineer, Network Administrator ✔ ️
‣ Network Operations Manager ❌
Which SD-WAN solutions have you worked with:
‣ Cisco Viptela, Solarwinds, Meraki... ✔ ️
‣ None of the above ❌
How do you primarily interact with SD-WAN:
‣ I configure and manage SD-WAN solutions daily ✔
‣ I oversee a team of people that work on it ❌
‣ I review performance metrics and dashboards ❌
Results: Artifacts produced
Research Prototype
Draft design
Research Prototype
Learnings
Designing variable based prototypes - There are scenarios where building out highly detailed, near functional prototypes are helpful. Because I built the prototype with variables, I was able to simulate more or less exactly what I intended the SD-WAN experience to be like, which was useful when communicating with stakeholders. This wouldn't have been the same if I had just prototyped out only a few specific scenarios in a more rudamentary way.
Understanding how to do difficult recruits - there may only be a few hundred engineers that fit the category of SD-WAN specialization that I was after, but there are a wide array of adjacent roles that could feasibly apply for a user testing recruit with a lot of specifications I was giving earlier on. Knowing how to filter out these users was a useful learning.
Understanding how to design for highly technical problems - An overall theme when working on this project for me was needing to bridge the gap between my knowledge and the knowledge of the highly technical users I was designing for. By breaking their tasks down into tangible, clear actions that related to journies and interactions with the interfaces I was working on I was able to do this effectively.
