Case Study — 2020
Dashboard Information Architecture
UX, Information Architecture, Research
TL:DRVonage is a platform that simplifies dealing with multiple global phone providers and web standards into a set of plug-and-play APIs for SMS, Voice, Video and others. The Dashboard is where developers and product managers go to authenticate, secure and configure their applications.
As the company expanded from a single SMS provider to a communication platform, the side navigation grew organically. It didn't support discoverability anymore, and neither leveraged the most used pages.
On this redesign, I've changed the navigation from a long product-based list into a task-based structure. It leverages the sections that, according to triangulation research, returning users need daily access. The new navigation saw a 19% increase in success rate.
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MY ROLELead and solo designer — discovery, requirements, research, ideation, design, prototype, hand-off
STAKEHOLDERSSenior UX Researcher — User testing
Product Manager
Engineering Lead
From a 'scrollable product catalogue' to 'empathetic task list'
The biggest challenge was the overwhelming volume of data to analyze. It required scavaging many research reports, analytics tools and creating a dedicated survey. In the end, I took the Pareto Principle to heart and made it easier to access 20% of the pages people will use 80% of the time. Based on triangulation research, I knew our critical tasks to be:
Managing funds - Important to everyone.
Keeping an eye on usage (analytics and logs) - Important to developers.
Managing account (generating invoices, managing numbers) - Important to product managers.
So, the new navigation was broken up into four main sections:
Quick links - For savvy users that need a fast path. Expose pages that returning users need the most. (e.g. billing, analytics, logs).
Build & Manage - For users that need to change their settings or set up new builds. Can be set-it-and-forget-it or on-going maintenance.
Troubleshoot & Learn - For new users that are learning the platform or troubleshooting their build.
More - About the customer's relationship with Vonage. (e.g. profile, team, company)
With the help of our UX Researcher, we designed a tree testing study and validated these changes.
🗝 improvements
Task-based
Bumped success rate to 19% higher than the current navigation structure.
Expose user’s permission levels
Make it easier to find if a user is the ‘account owner’ or a ‘team member’.
Global account selector
Move the account selector out of singular pages, and centralize it on the side navigation.
Global top nav
Leverages links for external pages on a place that won’t steal the thunder from the main actions.