Purchasing Cloud Services
As HPE pivots to an as-a-service company and delivers cloud-enabled services on the platform, it is imperative to enable configure, price, quote, and order functionality on the platform.
Opportunity: Enhance the online customer journey for discovering, trying, and purchasing HPE offers.
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Lead Product Designer
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Figma, Mural, Slack, MS Teams, MS Outlook, Notion, Jira, and Smartsheet
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2-3 Months
This includes discovery, research, analyse and design.
Testing and Iteration not included.
Project Context
Currently customers go to a HPEs sales portal to buy services from access points that have fixed term subscriptions.
As part of our mission to continuously create a seamless experience at HPE, I was tasked with leading the development of a feature that allows customers to grant their users the ability to customize and have the option to pay as a service within the cloud platform.
To successfully complete this project, I along with a new designer I was helping to onboard focused our attention on how we can provide the user what they need while also juggling the complex limitations and politics that comes with the reality of designing for an enterprise company.
After gathering requirements, we conducted further research and realized that customers actually need a way to integrate negotiated deals they have made with HPE and partnering sales representatives into the purchasing experience, rather than paying full price through our platform.
We set on providing an experience that made purchasing effortless by focusing on product discovery and automating difficult tasks.
Therefore, our design question became “How might we package a clear set of differentiated product offerings that align to a customer's needs?”
Process
We followed the user centered design process that focused on four key phases:
User Research
Design
Testing
Implementation
Using the business requirements and user research as our guide, we iterated through different solutions until we landed on a direction to design and prototype. We later tested our designs and have documented our finding to help further develop our next update.
Discovery I
Identify Business Needs
We started this project with a kick off meeting where stakeholders helped us identify user needs and project requirements.
Our primary task was to enable customers the ability to buy certain “as a Service” subscriptions directly from the platform while using the backend connections used by HPE outside of our platform interface.
Discovery II
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
To start with the research, we analyzed some of our competitors such as Azure, AWS, Sales Force, and Adobe. We discovered some similar features or patterns such as:
Allowing users to see the estimated price while customizing a purchase
Providing guidance or details for products or actions
Visible callout button
Use Case
While analyzing our findings, we discovered that we had an opportunity take the workload off of the customer by automating as much of the purchasing experience as possible. Therefore, we determined our solutions need to account for:
Product Discovery
Simple Customization
Automated Actions
Simplifying Discovery & Customization
Design Requirements
Prioritize MVP
Thinking through what our customers would need during the use cases identified, we determined design requirements for the solution. We did so to ensure we were holding ourselves accountable to referring back to the data learned in research, and to use these requirements as our guiding principles as we moved onto brainstorming.
Service Offerings
Our platform must offer services for customers to discover.
Selection & Configuration
Customer should be able to select and configure the services.
Purchase Order
Customer should be able to place an order.
Ideation
Visualizing The Ecosystem
Creating a flow chart was absolutely necessary in helping us understand the complex ecosystem of backend and API connections that touched on the user’s ability to create customized orders, grant purchasing power, and provide information for delivery and access. We were also able to identify gaps and formulate questions that helped the project team prevent unforeseen problems.
Below are pain points we discovered in the form of HMW questions.
How might we…
Allow customers to make purchases?
The platform will need to dedicate a location for our customers to make their purchase.Allow customers to configure their orders?
Purchasing required lots of backend checks and front end information that users will have to provide or verify.integrate customer “Deal ID”?
Customers will need way to get the discounted prices promised to them if they previously spoke to an HPE or partnering representative.
Solution
Simplify Complex Tasks
Our Solutions:
Add a Service Catalog:
Designate a catalog that will be service as the hub for all our services.Provide a wizard for service configuration:
Allows customers to configure their orders one step at a time.Authorize account selecting for Purchasing:
Some users are currently assigned a “billing account” role by their admin, this previously assigned role allows them to make purchases. Purchasing account will need to include account selection.
Iterations
After going through weeks of iterations and taking feedback from key stakeholders, we discovered the following changes to our original designs.
Key Discovery 1: Only 1 Subscription Service
How do we design a catalog for only one product currently being offered while making it adaptable for future iterations.
Solution: Simplify Purchasing
With only 1 or 2 upcoming available services, we removed the catalog and merged it to the current application library.
(Note: Previously, GLCP app library is does not serve as a catalog but will have this one exception until future services are available.)
Key Discovery 2: Daunting Entry Forms
Purchasing required lots of backend checks and front end information that users will have to enter.
Solution: Automated Data Entry
Secondly, we synced purchasing accounts information to our API so that to automate the checkout process such as their identity, shipping, and card information.
Key Discovery 3: Integrating Deal ID
Customers will need a way to get the discounted prices promised to them if they previously spoke to an HPE or partnering representative.
Solution: Automate “Billing Account” and “Deal ID”
Some users are currently assigned a “billing account” role by their admin, this previously assigned role allows them to make purchases. From the back-end, HPE sales representatives will link the deal ID to a user account email. From the front-end, users will be able to add their deal ID when configuring an order.
Key Discovery 4: Purchase Status
Customers will not have immediate access to their purchased subscription and will need feedback on the status of their current and part order history.
Solution: Design an order history page
We added a new tab within the Subscriptions area that made it easy to view available or pending orders
Final Design
We designed three opportunities for customers to interact with the GLCP in order to buy services. We updated one existing area - the application detail page - by adding a "Buy" button and prompting customers to purchase and onboard the service from the same page. We also innovated by creating a new experience where customers can customize their purchase and submit an order by selecting the "Buy" button. This experience had many backend integrations that automated the form details, recognizing the account and any sales agreements with HPE representatives. Finally, we created another new experience within the Subscriptions page to allow customers to check the status of their orders with feedback including: submitted, pending, and incomplete.