Stratus360

During the fall of 2019, I had the opportunity to work as a full stack developer at Stratus360 in Toronto. Stratus360 is a Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner that specializes in creating cloud-based CRM solutions using the Salesforce platform along with services such as AWS and Vlocity to elevate businesses and brands such as Rogers, Blackberry, Scotiabank, and more. At Stratus360, I was introduced to Salesforce development as a means for implementing our clients' CRM solutions, and also lightly worked with AWS and Amazon Connect to build an internal project that performed speech-to-text transcription, translation, and sentiment analysis to potentially help agents at call centers. Near the end of my term, I was fortunate to work on a project for one of our clients, BlackBerry, which I will be further discussing.

The project for BlackBerry comprised of building a subscription portal for their clients and redesigning their community page for an improved user experience. Since Stratus360 is a Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner, we specialize in creating CRM software solutions that improve customer experiences, leveraging our technical expertise in cloud and CRM platforms. My role as a designer and full stack developer was to first design the subscription portal and community page, and then proceed to development with Salesforce technologies such as Lightning Web Components (written in JS, HTML/CSS), and Apex.

BlackBerry needed a subscription portal that would allow customers to conveniently segment and subscribe to their preferred services/products in an efficient manner. A single subscription could compose of multiple services from a wide range of geographic regions, be of Personal or Account type, and link to a single email address. The main issues we needed to address when developing this portal were the following:

1. Complexity of creating a subscription
2. Outdated user interface (not complying with current style guidelines)
3. Poor and unintuitive user flow
4. Implementing features and functionality

To better understand BlackBerry's requirements and user needs, our team met with BlackBerry in Waterloo to scope out the project. The first thing we needed to understand was our users. Our users were enterprise customers that would need to create and manage their subscriptions to various BlackBerry services. After, I started mapping out a user flow that segmented the process of creating subscriptions in a way that would support the user's mental model.

From a UX perspective, we determined that having users create subscriptions similar to how you fill in an online survey with multiple sections would be the most intuitive and convenient for a user. This is mainly due to the many attributes that a single subscription contains (type, nickname, services, region). In order to make the process of using this subscription portal as seamless as can be, we put a heavy emphasis on making this a guided experience. We made sure that there were no dead-end states, always included confirmation modals when performing important actions, and imposed consistency in our UI.

There were several UI and functional requirements from BlackBerry that we needed to consider throughout the design process. Our subscription portal adhered to these requirements, constraints, and criteria:

1. Aligning with BlackBerry's brand guidelines
2. Maintaining consistency across UI components (buttons, cards, modals)
3. Consistent page layouts (buttons centre aligned, three column card grid)
4. Including specific details in each subscription card

These are the high-fidelity mockups I created using Adobe XD after continuous iteration based on discussions and feedback from BlackBerry and my peers.