Perfecting the Admin

The Admin was the very first project I had the pleasure to work with when I first started working at BIMobject in 2018.
The core functions of the project are currently in its final steps and will soon be launched globally.

My role

I currently work as the lead designer for this project and so far I’ve been conducting Comparative/Competitive analysis, Design Sprints, User interviews, and designing both wireframes and High fidelity prototypes. I also constantly collaborate with other designers to make sure we keep a design consistency through all company products, providing a single and smooth experience for all our users.
In addition, I worked alongside a few developers and the Project Owner.

Short brief about the company

Before talking about all the challenges and processes faced along the way, I think it’s important to share a brief information about the company and what we do here. Basically, BIMobject is a platform that allows users (e.g. architects, engineers, and designers) to visualize information and download building information modeling objects (BIM objects) from authentic manufacturers’ products. The Company Admin is the tool that allows manufacturers to add their content to the platform. There are other tools for manufacturers to analyze their products’ performance, but the Admin is the main tool for managing their products.The core functions of the project are currently in its final steps and will soon be launched globally.

The challenge

Our goal for the project was to allow manufacturers to upload their products as fast and as easily as possible without having to rely on our customer success team so often. Another thing was to update the UI with the new Design System that was starting to take place (you can read more about that project in a separate article). Our ambitions were to create a strong foundation that embraced a rapidly evolving business and a more diverse user base

High-level goals

Develop a frictionless and intuitive self-service.
Give manufacturers more control over their content
Create a platform for innovation and deeper engagement.

The Process

Kickoff

Without pre-existing insights, I partnered with our PO to explore how the existing manufacturers were using the solution. We talked with about fifteen existing customers and learned that the solution we currently had was not user-friendly, among other things.

Learnings

Manufacturers would meet up with the Customer Success(CS) team to have an onboard meeting to learn technical terms and how to get around the website.
The user could be someone in the marketing department or have roles such as Product Specialist, BIM specialist, and Products Manager depending on the side of the company. This means that people with different skills, knowledge, experiences, and daily work routines were visiting Admin.
The users see BIMobject as a place to market their products globally.
Some users wanted to have more freedom, without having to reach out to our teams to publish their products after a QA process, others thought that this was the best way to make sure every information was in place before going live.
BIMobject is a global company, which also means that there are CS teams helping the manufacturers in slightly different ways. I.e. Some countries would be demanding specific information and others would be helping out a lot more (almost doing all the work for the manufacturers).

After this first step, we used some predefined design concepts that helped us visualizing our users and potential opportunities.

The Emphaty Map

How Might We

HMW allow the user to have full access and control over their content without dropping the platform’s content quality?

Competitors

After that, we started to look for competitors. It was a tricky thing to do since BIMobject is the pioneer among other companies in the market. So our solution was to look into comparables. How CMS companies our solutions that had similar problems were solving them?

Design Sprint

Before I could jump into designing, it was important to align our findings with the developers and the CS team as well as to define which peace of the product to start with. So we did our first Design Sprint and invited two developers who already had knowledge around the product and two CS team members. Stakeholders and people that had worked with the project before were also included to do the lightning talks and Q&A sections.From that workshop, it was clearer for all involved people that we needed to start with the Single Product Creation (a separated Design Sprint would occur later on to focus specifically on the bulk upload flow). And that an inbuilt onboarding could help our users navigate through the process so that they wouldn’t need to reach out to us for small and simple questions.

Outcome

A lot of work has been done after almost 2 years, and we keep testing and modifying things. Here are a few high-fidelity prototypes:

Conclusion

Feedback

Working on a B2B solution can be challenging, especially when it comes to collecting enough feedback that can sustain the decisions made along the way.The solution has been constantly talking to our users in all different ways; through quantitative (surveys and Hotjar pulls) and qualitative (sending emails and booking online meetings to get a better understatement regardless of the user’s country) research. Since this first release consisted of only a small fraction of what the Company Admin is, we didn’t release it for all of our user bases, instead, we are allowed the user to opt-in for our new solution to see what their first impressions are.

Next Steps

Our next steps are doing new experiments (e.g. how can the Bulk Upload function in a better way and how can we allow free trial users to use some parts of our system) and updating the UI and UX of existing and necessary functionalities (e.g. users and settings).

Final Note

This is an ongoing project and hasn’t been completely perfect and frictionless. Like any other project developed in any other company, we faced a lot of the times challenges related to company strategy changes, budget changes, fundamental people coming and going out of it. But I believe that this is ordinary and what I wanted to showcase here is my work process and how we finally made our way from transforming a product that was not user friendly, with numerous bugs into a self-service tool in which current and new users can find a way to upload their most precious information to our platform.