Removing billing complexity for Cloud Service Providers
WEB | B2B SAAS PLATFORM
PROJECT OVERVIEW
METHODS
Information Architecture
Rapid Prototyping
Material Design
TEAM
2 Product Designers
Chief Product Officer
Head of Engineering
Lead Architect
TIMELINE
8 Weeks
(Apr - May 2020)
CATEGORY
B2B SaaS Platform
CHALLENGE
Aquila Clouds needed to simplify the bill creation process for Cloud Service Providers (CSP) in hopes of securing a deal with a major player in Managed Cloud Services in the Asia-Pacific region.
RESULTS
End-to-end re-design (login, onboarding environment, user management, customer settings, and review bill screens)
In development (estimated ship date October 2020)
PROBLEM
An unwieldy workflow preventing customer buy-in
While the existing product had all the functionalities needed for a CSP Administrator, its confusing interface prevented customers from signing on to the product. Common issues across screens included “filler data” within data tables, columns without logical order, and a lack of visual indicators to alert the user on important information.
Before - Overview of Bills
Before - Editing a Bill
Before - Editing and Applying Rate Pack
SOLUTION
A clear workflow and interface to help CSP administrators manage bills better
Through consistent feedback from our team of engineers, architect, product manager, and potential customer, my design partner and I delivered a final product that greatly simplified the bill creation and management process in under 8 weeks. Our design is in development and set to deploy in October 2020.
Onboarding Environments
Overview of Bills
Editing a Bill
Creating and Applying Rate Pack
Customer Bill View
CONTEXT
CSP BillOps Analysts must correctly apply different pricing models to each bill item
What business are we in?
It was our job to simplify and improve the process of applying pricing models so that CSP Administrators bill the customer correctly
DESIGN PROCESS
Constantly changing business needs = a new design each week
As the Aquila Clouds team is international, we held weekly remote meetings with the Chief Product Officer, Head of Engineering, Lead Architect, and developers. The leadership team would relay new information about the potential customer’s product requirements. While I was able to advocate for usability and keep some features the same, I worked with the engineers to adjust to new requirements and churn out new designs each week.
ITERATIONS
Feature 1: Overview of Bills
ITERATIONS
Feature 2: Editing a Bill
ITERATIONS
Feature 3: Creating and Applying a Rate Pack
Rate Lines are essentially prices for a resource based on consumption. A Rate Pack is a bundle of Rate Lines that are frequently used by a customer or group of customers.
DESIGN SYSTEM
Adapting Material Design to create the design system
We built a new design system for Aquila by using the Material Design system as a starting point and customizing it according to branding guidelines and interaction elements unique to the product.
FINAL SCREENS
A product that customers can say yes to
Overview of Bills
Editing a Bill
Creating and Applying a Rate Pack
FEEDBACK
“Her work was instrumental in us acquiring one of our marquee customers ”
— Desmond Chan, Co-founder and CPO at Aquila Clouds
RESULTS AND LEARNINGS
BillOps 2.0, in just under 8 weeks
In addition to the three features shown above, my design partner and I created new screens for the entire BillOps platform. This included login, onboarding environment, user management, customer settings, and review bill screens. Due to an aggressive timeline and constantly changing product requirements, I became skilled at learning technical concepts and churning out new designs quickly.
Our role as designers went beyond improving usability - a large part of our contributions was asking the tough questions. We had joined this project after the engineers had created version 1.0 of the product, so we injected a fresh perspective to the re-design, resulting in a practically new product designed for scalability, usability, and importantly, attracting future customers. Our design is currently being developed and projected to ship by October 2020.