PTC Operator Center
Designing an application to enable internal PTC operators to manage customer organizations and licenses.
Role
Lead Designer, PTC Atlas Team
Key Collaborators
Product, Engineering, Design, Tech Writing
Project Timeframe
July 2023 - October 2023
Challenge
Within the diverse array of PTC products, individual teams currently face the complex task of managing their customers through fragmented processes. As PTC undergoes a transition to a SaaS-based model for the majority of its products, a critical question emerges: How can we strategically centralize the management of customer organizations and their acquired licenses to cultivate a more cohesive and efficient approach across the entire suite?
Results
Definition
Before I onboarded onto this project, an MVP scope had already been loosely defined by product managers on my team. In order to fully understand their vision, I held a series of meetings to learn more about the scope and ask follow up questions.
The MVP targets a critical issue within PTC Operations, aiming to address the limitations of the current Admin Center, which handles orders for existing Atlas-enabled products, meaning products to be transitioned to Software as a Service (SaaS) and managed by the SaaS team - Atlas.
With upcoming SaaS products like Creo+ and Windchill+ presenting more complex licensing requirements, the legacy system, which is used to manage products like Vuforia and Kepware, falls short.
As a solution, the new Operator Center MVP prioritizes support for Creo+ and Windchill+ licenses, acknowledging tradeoffs that will require post-MVP iteration to cater to additional product needs.
Major Pain Points in Past License Fulfilment
Access management for many products involved in provisioning is clunky
Current processes do not support product SaaS transitions
What the PTC Operator Center Would Provide
Future support for advanced organization management features, like SSO configuration
User lookup and troubleshooting capabilities
Would support license fullfilment for SaaS applications
Discovery and Definition
Recognizing the necessity for a centralized tool to streamline the management of SaaS-based customers, stakeholders prompted an exploration into the existing challenges and requirements. In my initial engagements with key stakeholders, I delved into understanding the primary pain points and critical use cases.
Through these conversations, it became apparent that the demand for a centralized application emerged from the cumbersome and manual procedures inherent in fulfilling license orders for distinct PTC product groups. Each product group, such as Vuforia, Windchill, and Creo, operated with unique, unstreamlined, and time-consuming processes spanning the customer's initial purchase, product sale and onboarding, to troubleshooting license issues
After delving deeper into the core issue, it became evident that a comprehensive understanding of the future application's users and their tasks was imperative. While order fulfillment and license management had been touched upon in preliminary discussions with stakeholders, I recognized the need to formally define and map out the specific 'jobs to be done' and the internal roles integral to these processes.
Leveraging insights gathered by product managers through prior interviews with internal teams and roles, I synthesized their findings to validate and enhance my breakdown. This collaborative approach ensured alignment and accuracy in capturing the nuances of user needs and responsibilities.
Scoping
At this stage, I had a firm understanding of the problem and requirements. However, I was not yet sure about how all of the user actions and needs fit together coherently in an application.
I created and iterated on an information architecture of the Operator Center, which I validated with stakeholders to understand needs, prioritization of designing pages, and understanding technical limits of our services and APIs.
Overall, the application would break up into 2 paged for the MVP delivery:
Organzations Page
All Users Page
PTC Operator Center MVP Site Map
Wireframing & Iteration
With this knowledge of the product space building, I began to wireframe potential solutions.
With this new level of understanding, I felt ready to begin the wireframing process. From multiple rounds of iteration and sharing with stakeholders. Through wireframes, I translated ideas and concepts into visuals which I shared and received feedback for.
Building the Organizations Page
After defining the initial requirements, I was able to start structuring the first page of the Operator Center - the Organizations page. This page would function as a peek into all existing customer organizations and give the ability to create new organizations.
Low Fidelity Design
After roughly mapping out features for the page, I moved into more concrete, low fidelity designs. I knew that each organization came with specific metadata and that I wanted to display many orgs at once. Because of this, utilizing a table made sense in order to group many entities at once, as well as potential provide the ability to perform actions on them individually. Now, it was just a question of which specific fields and operations we would want to support for the user.
High Fidelity Design - Organizations Page
From a combination of collaborating with the product management team as well as understanding how an "Organization" is represented in data, I was able to come up with key fields to display for users.
Field Overview
Name is a customer set string to indicate the organization. It is clickable and takes the user to the org's details page.
PTC Customer Number is a unique identifier that represents the customer that purchased licenses for an organization.
Organization ID is a unique identifier set for an organization during the customer organization creation process. It is a common search query for looking up orgs in other existing systems used internally.
Status refers to the state of an organization, whether it is fully functional, disabled, awaiting activation, or encountered an error upon creation.
Created/Updated are important fields for indicating organization age and last seen activity.
Overall features:
Org filterability by string and date values
Create new organization button
View only insight into organization metadata
Organization Page Overview
Additional Pages and Workflows
The other pages and forms related to the Organizations tab followed the same process of requirements mapping, low fidelity, and high fidelity design iteration. Contact me at mdunkelman@gmail.com for a more in depth look into my process
Create Organization Flow
Create License Flow
High Fidelity Design - All Users Page
After following a similar iterative wireframing process, I created the All Users Page. The main goal of the page is to provide internal operators with the ability to query for all customers users for the troubleshooting and identification purposes.
Overall features:
User querying
Invitation resending
Linking to user details
Linking to organization details
All Users Page Overview
Additional Workflows
The other pages and forms related to the Organizations tab followed the same process of requirements mapping, low fidelity, and high fidelity design iteration. Contact me at mdunkelman@gmail.com for a more in depth look into my process
Create License Flow
Final Takeaways
Reflecting on this project, there were several key learnings and future steps to come.
Importance of Scoping
After trying to understand all user needs for organization and license management, it became clear that there were many jobs to be done. Working with my stakeholders to cut down to MVP features only helped focus my work.
Understanding Organization Lifecycle Management
This project marked my first large-scale team project, and I had to learn organization and license management from scratch. After extensive research and delivering the MVP, I’ve honed my skills in this problem space. This knowledge now aids in improving existing features and designing future app enhancements.”
Reusability of Design
Numerous pages in the Operator Center utilize common layouts and patterns, allowing for design elements to be repurposed. Recognizing themes across diverse workflows revealed that, despite functional differences, there were reusable UX elements.
Overall Reflection
Reflecting on my first successful team project, I gained essential insights from stakeholder collaboration and dived into a new problem space. This experience has equipped me with valuable knowledge for future projects.
Design Next Steps
As the lead designer for the Operator Center, I have been continuously adding new features and actions on user feedback. Future features to come include Single sign-on, auto user provisioning controls, and role based access controls to non-super admin groups.
