Welcome Hub

Overview

Imagine supporting a global membership organization in multiple verticals ranging from user and member account management to product testing and specification development. This organization is all about setting industry standards, yet the suite of tools and applications leveraged to support the customers are a disparate smattering of user experiences, inconsistent design elements, and limited shared navigation.

This is the story of The Welcome Hub. A new account management application intended to streamline access to our disparate sites and tools and provide users with a quick status for their work from any of the other applications they frequent and do most of their work within.

The first iteration of The Welcome Hub is already in place and we have seen a reduction in support tickets of 65% thanks to new self-service account management features released so far.

Visiontype

Problems/Opportunities

Problems

1. There are many disparate tools that users rely on to do their jobs.
2. There is no single, reliable, method of navigation between tools.
3. Getting a simple status update is inconsistent and tricky.

Opportunity

I introduced the concept of a member landing "Hub" and we hypothisized this could greatly benefit both our members and our staff. We would grow this hub from a product already under our purview that encapsulates all member and user administration activities associated with their account. We were already in the process of redesigning and rebuilding the account management application and would do so in a scalable and iterative way to accomodate future enhancements. This would become a landing hub for our users to provide a quick status update and direct users to different applications to address notifications and/or do their work.

Additionally, we included a proposal for a global navigation widget as part of our vision. This was another feature I had wanted to get prioritized in the past for our sites and tools, and we came close with a redesign of our consumer facing website, but, unfortunately, it was not adopted by other applications and did not offer all of the resources our members need most. Our global app navigation would be a widget that could be added to any of our custom applications providing a consistent navigation element between any and all of our sites and tools that could be managed from a single source without requiring each engineering team to make manual udpates.

Goals for the Welcome Hub

1. Navigation:
   Simple, stress-free navigation to and from SIG tools and resources.
2. Centralization:
   A user's most important information located in one place.
3. Modernization:
   The technology is built and designed in a modern way.

The Data

• 64% of users leveraged a menu on just one of our primary tools in order to find their way around.
  • Problem: This did not contain all links and different user groups care about different links and resources.
  • Problem: This forces users to start from a specific location, whether they need to visit that site or not.
• 30% of users use bookmarks to navitate sites and tools.
  • Problem: Links change periodically!
  • Problem: Users are forced to manage their own navigation in order to do their work.
• 6% of users use Google search and other means to navigate our sites and tools.
  • Problem: Users are forced to manage their own navigation in order to do their work.
• Multiple places to visit for status updates.
  • A single user journey to find a status could involve upwards of 8 tools and applications for one area of business.

The Story

During my tenure, I have set visions for addressing these disparate experiences in two separate ways in two different roles. First, in my role as a Senior UX Engineer working in close proximity with both the design and engineering sides of the house I was able to identify specific pain points in our collective efforts that were acting against us in defining a more seamless user experience. Primarily, we weren’t defining standards for design or implementation. Thus began the development of my vision for a Design System, which I was calling the UX Framework.

After my promotion to Operations Product Management Manager I could see that parts of this problem persisted, but in a slightly different way. We still had multiple tools, though their visual elements and behaviors were aligning much more consistently with our delivery teams still leveraging the UX Framework, but there were too many tools and some were SaaS platforms where we had little control over the visual and interactive elements. None of the tools shared consistent navigation between them or a way to view a holistic status of a user’s works in progress across the different business areas. Our Welcome Hub project aims to tackle these challenges.

Our goals for the Welcome Hub include simplifying navigation to and from multiple company tools and resources, centralizing a user's most important information in one place, and modernizing the technology we use. Research conducted from 2018 to 2019 revealed that users rely on a variety of tools, lack a reliable method of navigation between them, and struggle to get quick status updates.

In May 2020, during a major reorganization, the UX team was disbanded, and the cloud operations team was established. This led us to consider integrating our account management system with a starting point for a single view of a user's world. In fall 2020, I introduced the Welcome Hub concept, hypothesizing that it could benefit both our members and staff. 

In early 2021, we conducted research to confirm our assumptions about the Welcome Hub and understand how users would respond to it. Users were interested in the concept, and we identified important links and items to include in the hub. In June 2021, my team created a visionary prototype concept tested with real users. Our vision focused on navigation and creating a single viewpoint of everything a user cares about.

Our research showed that 64% of users used a general website navigation feature to access tools, 30% relied on bookmarks, and 6% used Google and other methods. However, these methods had limitations, such as not containing all important links and forcing users to manage their own navigation.

To address these issues, we proposed a global application menu widget that would display all links for our tools and resources, be customizable, and could be placed on any company-owned web page. This widget aims to provide stress-free navigation for users. 

For our second goal, providing a single view of everything a user cares about, we developed the Welcome Hub, a personalized member dashboard. This hub would display important information from other tools, personalized based on the user's interests, and serve as a jumping-off point to access those tools.

Initial usability tests with our members and primary user groups yielded positive feedback, with users appreciating the interface's user-centric design, the consolidation of information in one place, and the potential time-saving benefits. Overall, the Welcome Hub aims to simplify navigation and provide a comprehensive view of a user's work, addressing long-standing challenges at our company.

Verbatims from Usability Testing

• "I think everything [in the WH Concept prototype] is awesome, especially for Bluetooth SIG. You're really thinking about the interface from the end user's perspective. Personally, I'm very appreciative of it."

• “It's [the WH Concept prototype] very useful because you put a lot of information in one place. I think, a lot of things [today], it's hard for me to find.”
• “I would want this to be the landing page that comes up right after login.”

• "This would save me hours of my time."

• “This is good as a landing page as it contains quite some information more easily accessible than today. And for that perspective, it's a worthwhile thing for me.”
• “I hope to rely on this [Quick Links/Global App Menu] rather than on my bookmarks. That has reoccurring problems: links change, and when I have good links I never know how long they'll last.”
• “I like this design because it is more clear. The sub menus are very clear and I like that I can see all the items on the same page.”

• "Would prefer notifications in here rather than emails in most cases."

• "the information seems easier to find in this design than the website"