Problem:
A large, mature enterprise information (document) management system. Licencing had not been enforced and relied on customer goodwill.
We wanted to introduce licence enforcement. The challenge was to take into account existing customers who may be near or have exceeded their licence count, especially given they may have long delays to approve additional licence purchase.
My role:
Product Owner and lead researcher on the project.
Background research:
- Uncovered that many customers were not appropriately licenced and would need
- User interviews. Published a blog post in the company describing the possible changes and invited comments.
- Approached staff who had strong relationships with key customers.
- Conducted workshops with our technicians to determine if changes in licensing would affect their work.
Insights:
Identified 2 affected user groups.
- the customer’s admins would be affected by the changes, but only needed to be made aware of the new licencing models.
- our technical consultants could be blocked from completing tasks if additional licences were not available for them.
Ideation:
- During technical ideation I developed functional guidelines for the developers and asked them to solve the problem of how we implement them.
- I conducted detailed workshops with the technical consultants, mapping out scenarios and the pathways we could take to implement licences.
Prototypes:
- I separately mapped out the heuristics how permission would be granted for a user trying to access an action. These were all mapped out to form the basis of discussion.
- The software platform has various licence models, and many features which are separately licenced. Within each feature, there are levels of user.
- The team obsessed over the look and feel of “failure to proceed” dialogs. Users use this software for work, not fun, so we wanted them to experience as little friction as possible.