NGL

ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE

PRODUCTIVITY

Arm Next Generation Licensing Portal

To help SoC designers and engineers Arm provided a suite of software tools such as simulators, IDE, compilers, and debuggers. However the way these products were licensed to customers were complex, confusing, and the portal for both customer and internal admin users was fragmented and cumbersome creating friction and unnecessary time spent on licensing tasks. With an expanding customer base as a result of Arm Flexible Access this was creating a barrier for customer adoption and loyalty. I was lead product UX designer working with product owners, managers, tech support, and external partners on project to evolve the next generation of software licensing and all the benefits this could bring to Arm, its partners, and customers alike.

ROLE: LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER

DESIGN PHASES: DISCOVER + DEFINE + DEVELOP

RELEASED: FEB 2019

CLIENT: ARM

PLATFORM: WEB BROWSER

DESIGN TOOLS: ADOBE + SKETCH

PROTOTYPING: ADOBE, HTML, INVISION,

VISUAL DESIGN: ADOBE XD

In order to understand the problem from Arm sales and support team perspective a quick round of interviews were conducted to capture the key issues that customers report to the sale and support teams. Much of the feedback pointed to both the licensing models and support tools were not fit for purpose in the current software environment were license solutions were much simpler and self-managed by users. To quickly benchmark the current licensing platform a PURE (Practical Usability Rating by Experts) analysis was performed from the perspective of the administrator persona compared to established software products. While most UX methods—such as usability testing, card sorting, and surveys —are empirical, the PURE method is analytic. It’s not based on directly observing users, but instead relies on experts making judgments on the amount of friction involved to complete tasks. The experts break down the tasks into specific steps, and score them in a 3 point scale with the group coming to a consensus of the sum of scores, and agree on one rating per step.

As the higher the number the greater the cognitive load for a given task, it validated the hypothesis that the current platform was not fit for purpose. A decision was taken by the product, business and IT teams to migrate to a new licensing platform that could offer new licensing models and greater portal features. The next step would be to identify all the persona involved, map out their journeys and quantify their needs to feed into the platform development requirements. A set of persona was already created from the Flexible Access and Arm Download portal projects, so a quick review to assess their validity to licensing project was performed. This identified a gap in the persona list for the IT manager who would be involved in much the the upfront licensing decisions, setup, and then in renewals. To understand more about the needs and behaviors a round of interviews was conducted with IT managers from target customer organizations and other software companies. This enabled the creation of a new persona type.

In order to gather requirements from across the different business stakeholders, and to bring people together to agree the strategy, identify the goals, and focus on agreed priorities, I along organized and facilitated a 5-day design sprint. This was using the methodology from Google Ventures and Jake Knapp. Day 1 of the design sprint is about getting everyone on the same page with the strategy, goals, problem, and inspiration. To bring inspiration I wanted to convey 3 simple principles that we should be striving for; Invisible, Autonomous, and Frictionless, with product examples that greatly express the principle.

The design sprint was able to provide a clear definition of the problem statement, an agreed long term goal, outline and review of persona needs, review of the journey map for each persona type, a common area of focus for divergent thinking of ideation and sketching solution ideas that could address the problem applying the guiding principles.

The key focus area was around the self-manage portal for the customer and internal administration tasks. With this in mind a number of sketches and ideas were generated which them comprised a solution 'gallery' which stakeholders could vote for their favorite idea, component, solution, or feature with the product owner having the casting vote. All of the winning ideas were brought together into a single concept which was then turned into a rapid prototype and tested with target users.

The prototype and testing was able to validate many of the assumptions and to also expose areas of the concept that would need to be improved, and aspects or features that were missing. This allow for the creation of detailed user flows and wireframes that were then tested again with target users to establish viability and desirability, and workshops with development and IT teams on the configuration/customisation options of the new platform vendor would seek to provide confirmation of feasibility.

GALLERY