Solution Highlight

The Northstar project aims to simplify free trial and onboarding process for users, optimizing workflow in complex environments. By integrating and adopting cloud technologies, businesses can enhance agility and security when managing their data centers.

Target User & Pain Point

The main target user is IT Administrator, who’s responsible for managing the organization’s virtual network infrastructure, maintaining system performance in IT department. Their main duties include configuring network settings, monitoring network health, and troubleshooting issues.

The key pain point for these administrators is the desire to self-onboard NSX+ using their actual data center rather than relying on sales personnel. They seek a streamlined, intuitive onboarding process that allows them to efficiently integrate NSX+ into their existing environment, enabling them to securely leverage real data and configurations under cloud environment.

Design Principles

To address these challenges and pain points, I collaborated with key stakeholders to empower security IT Administrators to onboard NSX+ with confidence. I led the design strategy with a focus on three core principles:

• Efficiency: The onboarding process should be streamlined, ensuring users are not overwhelmed by excessive steps or time commitments.

• Intuitive: Each step must be clear and instructional, providing guidance that eliminates the need for documentation or technical support.

• Trustworthy: Users should feel secure and confident when connecting to their own data centers, fostering a sense of safety throughout the onboarding experience.

Success Metrics

The goal of this project is promote usage of key networking and security features, and increase the financial outcome of the product revenue when users are satisfied with the onboarding experience. Thus, I initiated a discussion with PM and engineers to track the following metrics:

Optimizing Workflow

With the goals and metrics in mind, I collaborated with key stakeholders on project requirements, and visualize the major steps a clear understanding on the representation of connections between cloud and on-premises environment. In this way, it would be more straightforward to illustrate the key areas that needs intuitive, instructional design for users.

I try to align the gap by bring customer’s voice to the table, the optimized workflow address key user concerns by:

• Protect credential by introducing cloud gateway, which bridge the gap between cloud and on-premises data centers, with more user-trust on the safety of connection.

• Encourage user to explore features by making it intuitive, clear and simple.

• Provide onboarding guide to make users feel more confident with purchasing subscription.

Transitional Pages

The old transitional page provides limited capabilities to access to the home page, showing progress bar in a full page.

In the proposed pattern, it solves the pain point by showing progress bar and visualized instructions in a pop-up modal, with slideshow format in carousal. The experience provides IT admin and tenant with quick tutorials to learn more about their permissions to the system.

Impact

• 80%+ adoption rate from onboarding experience to subscribing to key networking and security features.

• 30% increase in total revenue of NSX+ subscription.

• 9 out of 10 in customer satisfaction rate.

Learning & Reflections

• Take the ownership on as a design lead for guiding the project from concept to completion.

• Clarify the vagueness together with stakeholders by sharing objectives and requirements.

• Proactive communication with cross-functional teams to align design decisions with user needs and business goals.