Dell EMC Service Management (AIR)

I was excited to learn about this project and asked to be assigned to AIR. I love solving complex problems and knew this enterprise service support platform would give me the opportunity to learn and contribute a great deal to my team, which consists of a UX Lead, Project Manager, Lead Developer and myself as Lead Visual Experience Designer. Let me tell you about it.

Dell EMC asked Rebellion to help it digitally transform its current analog product support system in order to be able to offer customers a less expensive alternative. The core functions of Phase One are to enable managers to assign service contracts and for service support agents to document their work as they onboard a new contract. This will enable Dell EMC to see the health of the program and identify bottlenecks. 

Discovery

Our first steps were to ask a lot of questions and make sure we fully understood the product domain and its vocabulary. The client conducted user interviews but these did not provide the details my team needed to understand the current offline system. To help us and the client, we documented the current system in Realtime Board (now Miro). The digital whiteboard was a fantastic tool for helping the client understand the complexity of bringing its program online and it helped us identify what we did and didn't know.

Taking what we learned about the current program, the team documented a "day in the life” of an AIR manager and a service support agent via user journeys. This informed the navigation and dashboards for both personas. I enjoyed participating in two cross-functional mini-sprint sessions, which generated multiple design solutions that were voted on and presented to the client in wireframe form before they were handed off to visual design.

Visual Experience

While designing the UI, I kept in mind the functional nature of the product. My aim was to keep the UI clean and modern, while supporting the managers' and agents' need to easily orient themselves and quickly find what they were looking for. For inspiration, I looked at dashboard designs and data-intensive mobile apps, like sales and financial products.

The prominent navigation visually anchors the design as well as reinforces the Dell EMC brand. The content area was kept clean and functional. The account, contract and resources components are the heart of the site and they were a challenge to design. The most complex was the contract component, which relies on multiple statuses as it flows through the system on its way to completion.

Development

The front-end is component-based, with reusable responsive elements built in Vue.js. We did a tablet-first design in Sketch, then teamed with development to adjust upward to desktop size through font definitions and basic layout changes. I worked with development, QAing components via Storybook.

The design system is currently being documented in a Confluence wiki in collaboration with UX and Development. A soft launch of Phase 1 is scheduled in the second quarter of 2019, along with user testing.