Cloud Calling

Overview

Utilizing cutting-edge, effective digital communications and collaboration solutions is the top priority for many businesses. These tools are crucial to a company's ability to succeed given the growing usage of technology and remote employment.

A strategic recalibration of this magnitude is complicated for large businesses, though, as they have to deal with extra issues, such as multi-national, multi-site, and multi-regulatory dynamics, which further add to the complexity.

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Project goal

Our strategy at Kandy has been to create a system that can simultaneously manage multi-layered complexity across a variety of regional markets, including cloud-based voice services, worldwide PSTN management, SIP Trunking, and controlled premise gateways.
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UX objectives

As a design lead my aim was to align the solution to real-life use cases of our customers and achieve the following objectives within the planned sprints schedule:

• Identify and map most common use cases.
• Identify and resolve the biggest pain points.
• Make the workflows intuitive for the users.
• Make the workflows intuitive for the users.

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Research

I leveraged research studies that were performed by Microsoft, Zoom and other similar companies to find out more about the business challenges of cloud communications. In addition, I performed ongoing competitor analysis on Twilio, RingCentral, 8x8 and others to identity the competitive advantage of our offering. I held a series of interviews with our customers across multiple industries to understand their process, concerns and see how they would leverage our tool in their day-to-day.

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Analysis

My research helped me to understand the users and the nature of their needs from the system, as well as helped me to establish user expectations, concerns and challenges. In parallel, I established accurate user journeys for most common use cases, edge cases, as well as address technical limitations that came up in the process. I was able to document the findings and share them with the team to begin the ideation process and come up with initial concept ideas.

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Ideation

Having a good grasp on the product objectives and the challenges that we were faced with, I was able to start designing initial UI drafts. Initial drafts were produced as interactive prototypes in Sketch and InVision.

To better align the team I used the flow chart logic to link individual prototypes to reduce any confusion between use cases and provide a clean way to build and test the designs.

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Validation

As expected, I got the necessary feedback to iterate the UI designs and improve the main user flows to address the challenges and concerns of our users. Due to the quick turnarounds I was able to facilitate multiple rounds of revisions before handing off the design to the developers.

To test the design, we had a small group of close customers who were willing to participate. Overall, the tech savvy users appreciated the level of control within onboarding, user and phone number management flows. While small business owners reflected on the accuracy of support provided throughout the product.

Reflection

I based my design decisions on my research and user testing. I had quite a few moments of realization where common UI patterns and flows had to be customized in order to provide a more usable solution in the world of SaaS.

Feature planning made me a more efficient designer, by providing quick turnarounds on design iterations, planning phases of full feature releases, and working closely with the team to guarantee the expected outcomes.

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