AT&T business center 2
I participated in a project for bettering Business Center, AT&T’s business to business service management product. Companies that use AT&T’s communication services are able to manage them through Business Center, giving them greater control over their business. However, as the service is largely brought over from a legacy system, it was also in dire need of an informational and functional overhaul.
The Problem
Business Center began as a re-skin of AT&T’s classic B2B management site, so while the UI was slightly updated, information architecture and functionality still needed a big overhaul. Overlapping information was abundant, and navigation was tedious, making it unintuitive for modern business technology managers to use. Feedback from user testing also showed that the actual data the users needed were either not presented or difficult to find.
In summary, users frequently could not find the information they needed, while also being presented with information they didn’t need.
My role
I worked most heavily with the product and research teams, as there was a lot of foundational changes that needed to be made. There was a vast amount of information exposed to the user, and thus I had frequent meetings over how we could change the information presented, if any parts of the process could be automated, as well as if we could take some of the information overload away.
We had a dedicated research team to help test our proposed solutions as we worked, so another major part of my role was being able to bring them test-able cases and scenarios based on changes discussed with product.
challenges & constraints
Seeing that Business Center mainly dealt with customers’ hardware and servers, technical complication was an inevitable issue. Especially at the beginning of my time on the project, understanding the customer meant understanding the technical lingo, making it substantially harder to ramp up compared to B2C products.
While Business Center is one big product, each area was divided into separated design teams, so it was an ongoing challenge to not grow siloed and have each section of the site get out of sync from the big picture.
The Solution
Making use of stored information and UX to simplify the information presented and make BC smarter.
Through extended research on the existing product, I realized that the information already in the user’s system could be leveraged so that they didn’t have to manually enter the same information over and over. This alone cut out roughly 20-30 clicks from the process. Several outdated data fields (made irrelevant by updated hardware) were also taken out to further simplify.
Another part of the solution was surfacing all the steps into one screen, but presenting content in sections when it is relevant. For example, the task of creating a ticket could be simplified into a simple 3-segment process.
Being able to structurally reduce and refine, as well as present the user the data relevant to users, would make Business Center a much smoother experience for AT&T business customers.