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CPQ
Unified Sales Quoting
- User experience designWeb app
I was one of the two designers managing and executing the project from start to finish. We handled everything including project and client management, coordinating and conducting user interviews, and design execution.
As a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, they are striving to create smarter, simpler networks for businesses and other organizations by providing complete networking and security infrastructure solutions.
The quoting system was used by multiple types of users in their sales and distribution channels. The system included thousands of products and services that would be mixed and matched to create tailored networking and security solutions for leads and customers. It was also used to draft and deliver quotes, get internal approvals for special sales cases, and coordinate with the warehouse and distribution teams.
The tool was seven years outdated and unable to be upgraded due to massive customizations to a third-party software. A few other problems included user interface over-complexity, terminolgy confusion, and convuluted & hidden processes leading to lowered productivity, mass emails, and salespeople using different quoting methods including Excel spreadsheets, which were hard to version control, keep in sync, and access by different team members. By addressing these concerns, we had the opportunity to improve productivity, sales effectiveness and conversion, and employee & partner satisfaction. Overall, it would help Aruba's teams better do their jobs.
We had three months to get the information we needed, design, and iterate to final product before Aruba Networks transitioned into their testing and support project phase. With the massive spread and quantities of stakeholders, getting aligned over the course of the project would take a large amount of time and approvals were needed from each team lead. In addition, we worked alongside Apttus, a third-party sales quoting technology provider that would implement the final product for Aruba Networks.
For Aruba, success was the full adoption of a single quote management system and tool for their global team with a unified approval process for special sales cases, selling collaboration, features that assisted in the sales process independent of sales proficiency, and a user interface & terminology that was easy to understand. To help them succeed, we made sure we had a concrete understanding of their business, their existing product and processes, and their teams and users. We would align with their new quoting technology from Apttus and use our understanding to design the new system. After that, we would work with our internal engineering team and their third-party technology provider to deliver the final product for testing.
We focused on learning from previous problems to set up their new system for long-term scalability and use.
From the beginning, my design partner and I oversaw the entirety of the project, including project management and client management. We began the project by discussing and defining the project expectations and scope into a detailed Statement of Work document for the client before we dived into research and information gathering.
Our first step after aligning with Aruba Networks was to gather understanding behind the project. This began with a deep dive into the company, the existing quoting product, and the new quoting technology through multiple workshops, covering a variety of scenarios and workflows including different quote type business processes, partner and distribution channel collaborations, trade and regulatory product compliances, and general quote creation details. In addition, we conducted user interviews in-person and over web conferences with employees and partners across roles, teams, and countries in order to get a broad and thorough view of the many stakeholders of the quoting product. We identified many pain points and opportunities including the following ones:
After understanding the project from a business and a user point-of-view, we got to work on creating the structure of the new quoting system. We mapped out an ideal information architecture that would work for the new and the experienced user, including a new user who changes into the experienced user. We also mapped out the logic behind a Guided Selling feature within the quoting system that would help new users make their way through configuring and customizing a solution for the customer with accuracy and confidence. After working out a list of proposed changes, we organized, optimized, and created a Feature-Value Matrix to align the different teams defining technological level of efforts, business importance, and user importance.
A set of wireframes to cover each product page and clickable wireframe prototype was created to communicate and align with Aruba’s multiple teams. After approval to lay down the final stones, we flushed out the visual design using Aruba’s then newly rehauled branding and visual identity guidelines. Any elements not yet defined were created with the guidelines in mind, to best work with the existing system. With the design complete, we prepared documentation and specifications for the engineering team for handoff. Afterwards, we managed quality control with frequent testing and feedback sessions.
The project ended successfully. Aruba adopted a new quoting product for their sales team and their partners that was technologically easier to update to keep effective and secure. According to Aruba's internal testing team, the interface improved adoptability and usability significantly. The behind-the-scene processes were brought to the front for clarity. The old version along with spreadsheet quotes were phased out.
When working with large enterprises with many layers of management and a wide-breath of teams, it is important to take more time than I first imagined to understand the complexity of their processes and products that is necessary to keep a large machine running smoothly. The slower it moves, the more important it is to understand thoroughly as to avoid mistakes and slow down the process even more.