Designed a simple and efficient dashboard that centralized data and actions related to several troubleshooting workflows. It significantly increased the product's value to customers by reducing average time to troubleshoot by 60%
Principal UX Designer
Helpdesk Dashboard
Background
RSA SecurID is a multi-factor authentication product that is used by over 40 million employees of over 30 thousand enterprises worldwide, to login to work resources such as the VPN.
NPS survey feedback included customer comments expressing that the experience of troubleshooting user login issues using RSA SecurID was time consuming and frustrating. Follow up discussions with Product Management and Customer Support revealed that they had heard similar complaints from some customers. It became clear that this needed to be looked into
Deep Dive
We interviewed twelve Helpdesk admins from different customer segments to understand their process of troubleshooting and pain points. The feedback was consistent.
Key problem was Helpdesk administrators had to visit an average of 7 pages to collect the information needed to identify the caller, diagnose the issue and resolve it. It took approximately 10 minutes for most issues.
“ I have to hop through several different pages typically to figure out the issue, whether its expired token, or the PIN is incorrect or one of other several issues.“
Impact to Customers
Tall learning curve
Time consuming
Larger Helpdesk staff needed
Employee frustration and downtime
Vision
After brainstorming design solutions I realized that incremental design changes won’t make a dent. We needed to create a new interface to support the troubleshooting process that customers follow.
This was my vision for that new interface;
“A dashboard housing all the pieces of data and actions relavant to the troubleshooting workflow and presented in a way that makes it easy to process”
Design Process
Design Principles
Efficient
Simple
Customizable
Intelligent
User Persona
Kate is a helpdesk admin, her motto is to find information quickly to keep support calls short and customers happy.
It’s a tough task since she has to handle several support tickets across multiple applications. So its important to her that the applications make it easy and quick for her to execute that process.
Usability Testing
Design iterations were improved with input from customers.
High-fidelity mockups were usability tested for 4 common troubleshooting cases.
Result: Everyone was able to successfully complete the timed tasks in about 60% less time than previously recorded!
Final Design
Quick Search
Easily accessible typeahead search enabled admins to swiftly switch to troubleshooting the next user.
This eliminates several clicks and a couple page transitions to look up user in the traditional way. Since admins support over 30 requests a day, this resulted in major saving in time and effort.
User Details
It presents the information that the admin needs to verify the user. Admins can also customize it to display the user attributes they require.
Activity
This panel presents majority of the information needed to diagnose the issue, in an intuitive and hierarchical way.
It helps identify the relevant events quickly and then drill down into the details to identify the issue.
For some issues, the resolution can also be initiated directly from here.
Registered Devices
This presents the devices and browsers that user has registered. It makes it easy to perform common device related actions such as delete devices.
Intelligent alerts
Alerts eliminate the effort to diagnose the issue by cautioning the admin about certain events that are likely to cause login failure. System analyzes a number of factors such as PIN expiration date to generate the alerts.
Feedback
Helpdesk dashboard is the most appreciated and popular feature of this major release.
- RSA Conference
The dashboard is very effective. We no longer have a tickets backlog, they get resolved fairly quickly.
- Customer
We had been asking to make the navigation easier but this is so much better.
- Customer
This reduces total cost of ownership for our customers and improves their product experience. We have been able to retain customers because of it.
- Director, Sales
Next Phase
Several requests were recieved from customers to include other pieces of information in the dashboard. UX will work with PM to prioritize the enhancements and then design their inclusion in the dashboard
A deferred UX request is to have better tracking of how users are using the dashboard so we can have metrics to improve the dashboard in future. This functionality will be added in the next phase.
The success of alerts for troubleshooting has raised demand for it to cover additional failure scenarios. This too will be worked on in the next phase.