Creating a modern hub for Power Pages Administrators and beyond
Power Pages administrators manage numerous websites within large organizations, organized under environments and tenants licensed by the organizations. Initially, when the product was launched, the user experience was suboptimal, leading to significant challenges. To address these issues and respond to critical feedback, the design team embarked on a comprehensive collaboration with partners.
Our vision was to create an ideal hub over a period of four major releases, starting with a key announcement to our customers in Power Platform Conference, that would not only streamline the management process for Power Pages admins but also cater to all administrators overseeing a suite of products. This hub was designed to enhance efficiency, provide intuitive navigation, and offer robust tools for auditing and oversight. By focusing on user-centric design principles, we aimed to transform the administrative experience, making it more seamless, efficient, and empowering for all users involved.
How it started
I initiated a three-day design sprint to unite all partners and stakeholders in addressing the problem using the Double Diamond design thinking methodology.
This sprint allowed participants to review customer feedback collected through various channels since the product launch, analyse research insights into our typical user journey, identify pain points, understand customer needs and aspirations, assess the competition, and integrate these data points to better serve our customers and drive business growth.
01
Problem
Admins manage multiple environments and Power Pages websites. As organizations grow, it's important for admins to monitor the health, security, and performance of these websites. They need a centralized view to see all the data from their Power Pages websites. Admins also prioritize security and expect robust security features and reporting.
02
Proposal
Create Inventory, Security, and Analytics dashboards for Power Pages Admins. Continuously gather their feedback to brainstorm new features that can seamlessly integrate into the framework, providing them with essential observability and security tools, along with added delight factors.
03
Plan
Prioritize this workstream as our key marketing initiative to establish Power Pages as a recognized name in the industry. Implement observability and governance dashboards in the Power Pages Admin Centre by the upcoming Power Platform conference.
Design Principles
The design team had established a set of guiding principles to ensure we consistently adhered to them.
Early feedback from users
With our plan in place and design principles in mind, the design team swiftly moved to conceptualize the hub using a human-centric approach, defining all core jobs to be done (JTBD) by centering our persona. We then tested it with a few users to gather early feedback, which was incredibly helpful for making improvements and aligning our partners with the project's direction.
The first shipment, Minium "Desirable" Product
Stakeholders Love
What's in for the Business.
Following the shipment and announcement at the Power Pages Conference 2023, the business successfully established Power Pages as a recognized name in the industry. This paved the way for onboarding numerous new customers, contributing to growth in licensing and monthly active users (MAU).
37.5%
Growth in total number of tenants in last three months of shipping
35:65
New : Existing customer MAU ratio out of 19.6M
+19.6 M
MAU growth in last three months of shipping
48
Total new Super Mega, Mega and Large tenants, up 40% in last three months of shipping
Realizing "Design" north star vision
Guided by the design team's north star vision, bolstered by excellent customer feedback and business OKRs, senior leadership decided to further invest in developing the admin hub. This led to the creation of "Project Buxton," an internal V-Team comprising designers and product managers from various products, all collaborating on a shared administration platform to enhance the overall user experience and deliver greater value to our customers.
This workstream focused on discovering and designing the next wave of capabilities and the overall user experiences for five key management hubs within the Admin Centre: Security, Value, Monitoring, Deployment, and Copilot. Integrating Microsoft's Copilot offerings into the product was a key focus area in the evolving technological landscape.
Today, inspired by our design vision, the hub intuitively groups all related tasks (JTBD), which otherwise was a wall of links, and reflecting on our journey, the design team has significantly connected the dots, driving customer delight that is both relevant and value driven.