N-able UX: What we do

Understanding MSPs is crucial to understanding how we work, and why usability and usefulness are so important to us. MSPs are IT professionals, they manage complex networks, they drive efficiency and security, they stay ahead of cyber threats, and they automate key processes, to name a few.

When they are looking for software solutions to support their businesses, they look beyond the innovative buttons and cool new icons. Instead, prioritizing a robust, scalable, and effective product, that is easy to use and helps them get their jobs done in the most streamlined, logical, and efficient manner.

On top of that, what we do impacts more than just the MSPs themselves, it also impacts:

1. The MSPs’ customers, some of which may log in to our products from time to time.
2. Our distributors and resellers, who sell our products to their customers.
3. The Technology Alliance Partnership (TAP) that we belong to, which gives our partners access to a growing network of third-party integrations and services.

Create lasting partnerships

So, not only do we need to think about our direct users (the MSPs), but we also need to consider their customers, our distributors and resellers, and how we integrate third-party applications. We have a lot to take into consideration, not to mention the breadth of monitoring that the MSPs need to manage. In this way, we really consider our MSPs to be our partners. By improving MSPs’ ability to deliver services, increase their value to their customers, and help grow their businesses, N-able truly embraces the notion of partnership. In company meetings and presentations you will often hear: “If our partners succeed, we succeed.”

A partnership is a relationship and a two-way street, which is very true for UX and our MSPs. Communication is fundamental to getting to that sweet spot for all of our partners. If we don’t listen to them, we will make assumptions, and if we make assumptions, we are much more likely to get things wrong.

Communication means talking to partners and listening to them, not only after a feature has been released, but also involving them from the very beginning. On top of this it means working to improve things post-release, because we don’t always get it right the first time, and things can change once partners start to really dig in.

Communication alone is good, but communication along with data is great. We firmly believe that having a data-driven approach to back up our design decisions alongside communication creates a holistic view of what we need to do, why we need to do it, and for whom we need to do it.

We have two main branches of our UX team: researchers, and designers. Together, along with support and guidance from UX leadership, they make up the building blocks for a successful user experience.

Research

Researchers don’t just focus on being the voice of the partner, they also help us build relationships with partners as well, and we have many different channels through which we do this:

• Show Me Sessions — where our partners show us one-on-one how they use our products and features.
• Generative research — where we develop a deeper understanding of partners in order to find opportunities.
• Feature walkthroughs — where our partners give us direct feedback on a particular product or feature.
• Usability testing — where partners perform a set of tasks so that we can observe their behaviours.
• Slack — where our partners can directly send us feedback, often through images and GIFs, and where they can talk to other partners about frustrations and pain points, or to get advice.
• Surveys — where we collect quantitative and qualitative data about our partners’ interactions and experiences.
• Sessions — where we gather feedback, insights, frustrations, and pain points from our partners.

Researchers are also instrumental in gathering partners’ feedback to drive the different phases of a project and help us uncover product needs, eliminate assumptions, and learn along the way.

Understand

We first aim to understand the problem. The main focus at the beginning of a project is learning, exploring, and understanding our partners, their problems, their environment, and their current processes to inform design decisions. The direction of a project may change based on research done in this phase.

Validate

We then validate iteratively in the middle of a project to help us get feedback on different concepts and narrow down ideas. The main focus is validating workflows and usability of the mockups. We also try to understand the overall perceived value of the feature and learn about specific use cases.

Refine

Toward the end of a project when the team has moved into development, but before release, we focus on refining. The primary aim here is to validate usability and uncover issues or bugs in the prototype, build, or beta. Secondarily, we focus on perceived value and use cases. This is usually the first time we see how things look in the real world, with a customer’s real data/environment.

Evaluate

Finally, we evaluate, and see the real-life usage of a released project and verify the product is doing what we originally set out to do. This also helps us uncover value adds or needed functionality for future releases.

As you can see, Research is there every step of the way and heavily supports the design team. Next we’ll look at how the Design team works in parallel with this.

Design

The way we approach design is important. Because design isn’t just pixels on a screen, it’s about the whole experience. It’s about solving real problems for our partners and striving for unexpected moments that elevate their experience beyond the mundane.

Know your partner

Our designers are responsible for taking the voice of the partner and turning it into a tangible workflow, feature, or product. They are fundamental in fulfilling the partner’s needs, providing meaningful experiences, improving the partner’s efficiency to accomplish tasks, and, dare we say, delighting them. They provide the “what” that derives from the “who” and the “why”.

Useful, usable, delightful

We try to narrow our focus to features that provide real value and only focus UI on what is really needed. We reduce to the essence and celebrate content. Delighting partners can be a controversial term in the UX world, but we see delighting partners with products that feel intelligent, immersive, and responsive as much more compelling.

Intuitive, consistent, and reusable

We aim to have instant understanding, as our partners should be able to move quickly through our products based on a combination of precedent, experience, and personal intuition. We try to produce common interfaces that are flexible enough to account for differences between products and data, but consistent enough to be familiar to partners working in different parts of the same product or across different products.

When we’re thinking about how our products should work, we need to consider how screens, components, and interactions can be reused and repurposed in the future.

Putting it all together

These principles all come together to become tangible designs in different ways. We use a combination of sketches on paper, whiteboarding techniques (both virtual and in-person), wireframes, and low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. Occasionally, we also get the opportunity to work on proof of concepts with our engineering teams to really bring our designs to life for testing purposes.

We share our designs, with engineers, product managers, and other internal stakeholders, as well as partners to get feedback. We iterate, iterate, and iterate until we feel that we have it right, even if that means iterations post-release.

But most importantly, we aren’t precious about our designs, because it’s not about us and how we feel, it’s about our partners and how they feel.

We ensure that our engineers have everything they need to successfully implement our designs, including the right components, icons, and illustrations. We ensure that our researchers have the tools they need to conduct their various evaluations. We work with cross-functional teams to help deliver the right experience inside the product and out.

Working better together

Research and design need to work together closely, as each phase is as important as the next. These roles work in lock-step to help deliver the best possible usability alongside a first-class, partner-centric experience.

Our researchers and designers are experts in their fields and work together to share knowledge and ideas, as well as helping to elevate each other continuously.

Working better together is not just about usability, it’s also about our own team as well.

Look out for our next article, where we take a deep dive into our UX culture.

Credits
Sandra Dennis
Senior UX Designer