Inventory App Overview
WHAT IS SPICEWORKS?
Spiceworks is a platform for IT Pros consisting of a social community, educational content, product reviews and free apps like Help Desk, Inventory & Network Monitoring. Basically everything an IT Pros needs to do their job.
BACKGROUND
When a user goes to their overview page in their Spiceworks Inventory App, they aren’t shown a breakdown of all of the sections in their Inventory very well. They come in wanting an overview of their network as a whole, but are greeted by just their a breakdown of their device groups and a timeline. There is confusion on their part about what the function of this page is other than navigation. This is also a bit of a business problem because they aren’t aware of all of the services Spiceworks offers to them since these are only in the navigation dropdown.
GOALS
Primary
- Find out what a “useful” inventory landing page might be for them.
Secondary
- Explore “suggestions” or tips to show based on items they have or don’t have successfully inventoried in Spiceworks.
- Modernize the styling as the previous landing page hadn’t been touched in a few years and looked out of date with the rest of the app.
PROCESS
- Gather up notes and videos from previous sessions where I watched users use the inventory portion of the product and summarize findings.
- Conduct more interviews and watch them use the product to dig in deeper.
- Come up with a list of design priorities.
- Quickly iterate based on those findings.
- Conduct rounds of user testing to find the iterations or pieces of concepts could be created to get towards a concept we felt confident developing.
DESIGN PRIORITIES
- Enhance the overview. Give them a solid overview of their the devices, software, people, and cloud services that have been scanned and discovered by the Spiceworks Network Scanning Tool as well as things they’ve added manually.
- Organize by the categories that exist in Inventory. Provide breakdowns of each section that was discovered during research and work with our internal IT Pros to fine tune what would be displayed.
- Continue UX patterns of the rest of the app in regards “clickable efficiency”. Make sure everything is clickable so they can dig in further and not just a place to display breakdowns. It should feel like a way to navigate to sections that are interesting to them.
- Push our current the Design System further to enhance organization. Explore adding more color for each section to aid in scan-ability and add more of a color palette than the Spiceworks orange and grey color palette we currently offered.
- Give them actions to take when applicable. Explore “suggestions” we could offer in each section to either get more items properly inventoried in Spiceworks or when something has gone wrong or needs to be setup.
SOLUTION
Provide the user with a breakdown of the main sections of their Inventory and give them some actionable items they can take or areas where they could round out the completeness of their Inventory.
MY ROLE
- User Interviews
- Digital prototype review with users
- UI/UX design
SCREENS
