The problem

What does each employee need to streamline workflows and boost productivity? What apps support these workflows? What policies keep devices secure and compliant with industry regulations? We used insight from thousands of deployments and a partnership with Apple to solve these questions. In the form of a simple wizard, industry templates help IT admins can easily deliver the right mobile ecosystem to the right users.

The Team

I was the lead product designer on a team made of front and back-end developers, QAs, User Experience Researcher and a Project Manager.

Project Scope

To select these industries, we needed help from the marketing and sales teams. These industries must have use cases where iPads could increase workers’ mobility. We identified 5 such industries for the first phase of the project.

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The Design Process

The goal of Industry Templates was simple: to allow admins to set up apps and policies, and to assign them to a group of users. However, this was easier said than done, since the AirWatch console is very complicated and has multiple dependencies affecting every component. Some of the design decisions I encountered were around the following flows:

Adding Apps

When digging deeper into how apps are added, I had three types of apps to consider:

 

  1. Pre-selected apps which were required for each workflow
  2. Public apps from the app store
  3. Internal apps that admins can add

I understood the different requirements for each type of app and how the added app would tie into our backend. More importantly, I had to

 

ensure that selections were made clear and account for edge cases such as having more than 10 apps being added.

Restrictions and Policies

AirWatch has different restrictions and policies, but for a user, this distinction wasn’t that important. I decided to simplify the flow by having a single section for both. Since all these also exist in another place in the console, it was important to make distinct statuses visible such as available, default and modified.

Adding users

Adding users presented another challenge to the flow. Again, users are stored in a different location which created some technical challenges to this process. I had to work within these constraints so that admins can search for pre-existing user groups and individual users, add them and then display them.

Understanding the why with user research

Once we had our flow ready, we decided to test it, with a focus on the healthcare industry. Our assumption was that the usability issues for templates would be similar across industries. We conducted moderated tests with all our participants.

Test Design

  • Each participant was given their role as a healthcare admin, background situation, and a goal.
  • They were provided with a prototype to freely interact with.
  • We observed them as they completed tasks and completed the session with a semi-structured discussion.

Feedback

 

The Results

Industry Templates was announced in the VMware AirWatch Connect conference in September 2016 with a live preview of the designs. It was launched as one of the biggest updates in the AirWatch 8.3 release in February 2016.

Some more coverage of the release:

An unexpected lasting impact

The illustration style I introduced in this project was well received by VMWare leadership. I carried this style over in additional projects and once I left, visual designers continued to use this style in following projects.