Invite Users Overview

Inviting a user is a newly developed feature for DMSi’s next white-label eCommerce platform. When managing users on the current platform (PartnerView) the task is painful and time-consuming for our customers. 

PartnerView requires our customers to manage all their customers own customer base. In other words, if our customer has 10 customers who each have 100 users, then that’s 1,000 users that our customer must support; adding, updating, and removing. 

The pain is not only in the amount of work, but also in the burden of financial and employee resources our solution creates.

Entering its 10th year in production, PartnerView has never met business or customer expectations for various unfortunate reasons. One example, the platform was built on a single page ajax framework which alone created a lengthy list of never-doable features.

With the significant increase in businesses moving online during and after the pandemic, it was clear to leadership it was time to sunset PartnerView and create a far more functional replacement.

This case study covers our objectives, resources, challenges, and outcomes for a feature that’s already creating an anticipatory buzz with our customers.

Objective
  • Allow the admin user of our customer’s customer to invite and manage their own users
  • Relieve the workload of our immediate customer, who, after implementing PartnerView, must manage the user base of their entire customer base. These includes:
    • Creating all users profiles
    • Updating profile permissions
    • Removing users
Team Structure
  • Product Owner
  • UX Designer (Skip to my UX atrifacts)
  • UI Designer
  • BA
  • QA
  • Technology Manager
  • Technology BA
  • Technology QA
  • API Developer (2)
  • Architects (3)
  • Middleware
  • Digi Commerce – Front end & CMS Development
Methods & Tools
  • Mural Information gathering/sharing
  • Zoom User feedback session recordings, and all team correspondence
  • Dovetail Research repository and company insight sharing
  • Figma UI designs, prototypes, and annotations
  • Jira Project/task management
  • Goodnotes Task flows, wireframes, and notes
What we did
  • Significantly reduced our customer’s interaction and workload with their own customers
  • Injected a vital customer buy-in feature into Phase 1 development
  • UX/UI-specific responsive design
    • Desktop
    • Tablet – Portrait, landscape
    • Smartphone – Portrait
  • Explored User Roles templates for quick user set-up
    • Reserved for Phase 2
Process
  • Reference insights from previous customer discover sessions
  • Compile user management pattern examples
  • Task flows & Wireframes
  • Collaborate and iterate with PO on solutions
  • Collaborate with Architecture, API, Middleware team
  • Low fidelity testing
  • UI development
  • High fidelity testing
  • Annotations
  • Hand-off to Digi Commerce for preliminary stories
Research & Results

Discovery

The pathway that brought this feature to life began in customer support log research, where confusion about adding and removing users surfaced.

Later, during general customer interviews about their PartnerView usage, we uncovered the incredible workload our platform created for our customers regarding maintaining users.

Many users outright refused to buy into the next platform if there were no way to place the onus of profile management on the shoulders of their customers. Others pleaded for a solution, while others shared the gross amount of work and unwanted responsibility it added to their days.

Feasibility

Our evidence showed that Inviting a User is a vital feature in the eyes of our users and one the team deeply desired to take on.

Feature feasibility required more than discussion by Planners, Front End, Back End, and DigiCommerce. The complication lay in DMSi’s flagship ERP product, Agility. At this time, PartnerView users are created and maintained in Agility. 

Through team outreach to Architecture and Progress programmers, we learned inviting users is possible through an API that did not exist at the time.

We knew the front end and new framework would support the effort, so, this news told us, creating a new API is easily achievable with the two resources on the team.

Gaining Stakeholder Buy-in

Equipped with customer data and answers to perceived stakeholder questions, myself and necessary members of the teams assembled to convince our stakeholders that developing the newfound opportunity would be vital to current customer buy-in and highly recommended for Phase 1.

Although the effort of discovery and feasibility involves many people and is time-consuming, it is the necessary lubrication stakeholders require to make a quick and informed decision. And in this case, Inviting a User was agreed upon as vital and added to Phase 1 development.

Customer support logs and interviews are uploaded and tagged in Dovetail
Visual Results

Desktop

Tablet – Portrait & Landscape

Smartphone – Portrait only

Our challenges
  • Current technical limitations only allow inviting one user at a time
  • Understanding the complexities of assigning access for Branches and Ship-to’s and their respective defaults
  • Flexible solution; not all our customer businesses operate the same
  • Limited timeline
Overcoming challenges
  • Gain user buy-in for single-user invite solution in Phase 1 and multiple invites in Phase 2
  • Interview a breadth of DMSi customers to cover all possible user set-up solutions
My UX artifacts