Integration Hub

I led the creation of Halo Integration Hub, a centralized space for application teams and developers to manage their integrations and speed up process automation.

ROLE

Design Lead

TIMELINE

6 Months

TEAM

Product Managers, Engineers, Developers

CONTEXT

Halo Integration Hub is a centralized space for application teams and developers to manage their integrations and speed up process automation.

PROBLEM

There is no centralized space for application teams and developers to manage their integrations. Currently, there are over 15 Word Document forms we email to clients, 3 different provisioning systems, and no self-service offered.

RESEARCH

To kick off this large project, we documented the current user journey based on a specific persona we developed and noted their pain points. We also completed 10 user interviews with clients who have integrated with us within the past month to ask them about their experience.

SOLUTIONING

One key aspect of our solutioning was to align the engineering and product teams on the recommended path forward for back and front end systems. We held many sessions with each team weighing the pros and cons of our options. Another key part of solutioning was developing the recommended user journey. By doing so, we were able to demonstrate to stakeholders what gaps we can close and how much time can be saved for clients and internal teams.

PLANNING

Because of the amount of work involved in this project, we worked with product and engineering to group work into two epics and and prioritize the efforts based off of product priority, available resources, and business impact.

USABILITY TESTING

We did multiple rounds of usability testing to really nail down the information architecture. Here are examples of the navigation we tested:

RESULTS

After compiling the usability test results, we realized that a majority of users spend the most time requesting their integrations or managing their integrations. A majority of users also had the technical knowledge of which integration they wanted to request prior to requesting. 

CHALLENGES AND HOW WE OVERCAME THEM

FINAL DESIGN - DASHBOARD

A majority of our clients had the technical knowledge of which integration pattern would work best for their app prior to landing in the integration hub. Therefore, we landed the user right on their dashboard to add their application or manage their integration. We also checked user ID's to see if they were the owner of applications from our systems. If they were, we added their application for them automatically.

FINAL DESIGN - GETTING STARTED

Another idea that came out of usability testing was clients wanted to understand the full scope of the integration process.

FINAL DESIGN - DOCS

We had very limited documentation available in a SharePoint for clients to read integration guides to help them integrate. We compared the number of clients to the click rates on the SharePoint pages and concluded clients do read the docs. We also interviewed our Client Support Team and asked how they utilize the limited documentation. They often refer to it during consultations or when supporting clients on calls. We worked with Architecture to really flush out each integration pattern's documentation.

REFLECTION

This work is currently in development for this project as it did take some time to onboard developers to the ServiceNow platform. However, the time this hub will save both clients and the Client Support Team is invaluable and worth the wait. One of my major take aways from this project is to throw away all assumptions at the beginning of the project. Our team made assumptions about clients not reading technical documentation and it proved to be incorrect. For these clients, it is integral to have technical documentation ready and available.