Kore Wireless — The Future of network communications.

KORE is a pioneer, a leader, and a trusted advisor in delivering mission critical IoT services and solutions. We help eliminate the time-consuming need to identify, evaluate, contract, and manage multiple network connectivity providers, equipment manufacturers, and professional services organizations as you build out your IoT solution. Along the way, we offer proven expertise and guidance that can help you maximize your IoT investments and transform IoT business performance.

The need for redesign
As businesses grow and evolve, products need to evolve as well with the diverse and growing requirements of the business. The existing product worked well with the users but it was becoming difficult for it to adapt to increasingly complex demands of new features to support growing networks and increasing content.

My Role -
We were 3 designers working remote from France and India every designer had a designated job, I worked as UX & Visual designer, we worked closely with a dedicated product owner, the lead tech and a remote development team at Alpharetta, Georgia. My role involved all stages of the product life cycle. I started with user research to help identify market needs. Using design thinking methodologies we tested hypotheses (using clickable prototypes) and iterated our solution to best suite the user needs and business requirements.

The advanced checkup dashboard for a single network provider —

As the company grew, the number of network providers on the platform grew as well. Each provider had a time table to follow, diagnose reports, view system details and manage. Now, the company did have an internal portal to manage this. But it was completely outdated and not great in terms of functionality.

Pain Points —

1. The dashboard previously was built keeping needs of a very simple network in mind. It didn’t have provisions to expand into a fully-fledged management suite.

2. Erstwhile, dashboard didn’t have features to meet complex business requirements like tracking IMEI, detailed system data at a glance with various filters, sending single/bulk network activated and deactivated requests and more.

3. It also didn’t afford for product creation flows on mobile — a fast growing requirement in today’s mobile-first sellers revolution around the world.

4. Viewing the same segment of data in different visual formats was limited and not possible without cumbersome navigation and/or repetitive filtering.

Design Decisions

While rebuilding the experience, all the design decisions were made on the basis of further points:

Reviews from existing customer base: We did multiple user calls to figure out patterns, and also talked to the team to figure out the common and uncommon pain points faced by customers.

Metrics: We were informed about funnel drop offs, checked heatmaps and funnel conversions.

Product Managers : Our product manager defined stats that would be the useful and required to be shown in charts for better perception. we ended up having stats to be shown on dashboard as must haves.

Developers: Regular meetings with developers since the beginning of the project about the feasibility of what I was designing, giving them examples with low fidelity prototype.

Statistics Dashboard —
The first thing on the list was to create a new statistics dashboard that would give detailed insights about the diagnose report of the network.

Right at the beginning, I knew how I wanted the dashboard to look. Big blocks of stats and content, large texts, and an appropriate amount of information. To make the information logical we pre decided on the architecture part.

Well, keeping in mind that a user will be willing to spend five seconds to find the information they need.

Design Process -

So let’s break them pain points into one by one and there solutions 🚀

1. Connection Information: the user can see general information about the network carrier, which includes, connection information, connected hardware & diagnosis reports.

1. Analysis Results : this includes three main divisions diagnosis, provisions and IMEI.

• Diagnosis — Network administrators and technical support personnel can use the information in the event logs to analyze connectivity problems or help interpret the conclusions.
• Provision Analysis — network provisioning primarily concerns connectivity and security, which means a heavy focus on device and identity management.
• IMEI Analysis —IMEI identifIes valid devices the network in being used on.

3. Data usage graphs : This showed per day data usage of particular carrier, which can also be viewed monthly, yearly.
However, it was equally important for us to visualise our data and choose the apt graph type.

• function plot graphs for illustrating continuous data, such as how something has changed over time
• Tables for displaying summary information.
• Bar graphs for displaying discrete data, comparing variables, and plotting categorical data

4. System Details : This has a a detailed list of where all this network has been used with time stamps, given this information is heavy to load we have given multiple filters and sort.
The network engineers used system details data to mostly activate, deactivate or suspend provider in a particular region.

The Final Solution —

So the optimal solution which the simplest one was to make the core metrics change based on its own filter.

• The user would have complete control over the UI.
• Nothing would be jumping around.
• And no unnecessary clicks.
• Time consumption to view data reduced.

We did an extensive survey from analytics data about our users. A common theme emerged that almost all of them used a desktop screen wider than 1200px initially, its responsive now.

Mobile web dashboard experience —

This was for us one of the most challenging problems to solve for as a fast growing requirement in today’s mobile-first sellers revolution around the world.
To create dashboard as an m-web experience we had to keep multiple things in mind , mainly managing numerous quantitative data.

We already had the personas ready, the research was done while designing for web. The pain point here was how do we customise data in a way that is easier to access and understand.

After going through multiple references and design patterns. We took our chance of building a customised dashboard, which allows users to choose the features data they want to view on mobile dashboard.

Modals and pop ups played a really important role in mobile designs.

On desktop users can see all the data widgets at one glance, while on mobile its a very limited real estate. We gave our users the freedom to select the data on the basis of their priority and selection, Given the rest of the data can also be explored the the details screen which is one click away.

We researched more on-

• What information do users care about most?
• What actions do users want to perform?
• If there are different types of users, how might their needs be different? What do they want to see differently?

When the users first signed up on the mobile, we asked the to chose the features they wanted to easy upfront which helps us reduce clutter, had a minimal looking interface, On the contrary we also applied caps over 3 featured to be shown on home page other than the single days data that we showed as a carousel, it was interconnected.

Clean & Minimal Interface

Our users are people running a business. The content of the dashboard is critical to them. The minimal & monochrome visual aesthetics puts the user’s focus on content — numbers & text. We also took care of accessibility while deciding the colour palette.

Outcome

Our m-web users are happy and have switched over to the app without any glitches or complaints.