Microsoft
B2B Tenant Friending
What is “B2B Tenant Friending”?
On Microsoft Azure, we currently have a way to invite individual users for B2B collaboration, however, don’t have a way to invite groups. B2B Tenant Friending was a project to enable group invitations among B2B collaborators.
Overview
There was a high demand from customers in need of the ability to send and receive tenant invites for specific groups at organizations they work with. e.g : Coca-Cola needs to allow a group in a bottling company to access Coca-Cola’s bottling operations resources.
Duration:
October 2018 ~ June 2019
Worked with:
Jodene Eikenberry (Senior Designer)
Elisabeth Olsen (Product Manager)
Role:
Interaction Designer
Deliverables:
High fidelity mock ups (Adobe XD)
Clickable Prototype (Adobe XD)
Problem
Currently there is only a way for organizations to invite users individually. Customers really want a way to give access to organizations as a group.
Challenge
Create an experience for organizations to invite partner organization groups. Including invite, consent, edit, and delete experiences. Which can allow users in the friended organization to access my organizations resources without being added individually.
From low fidelity to high fidelity mock ups
I was given some mocks from the the senior designer that I was working with and created higher fidelity mocks.
Flows
· Request (to send an invite)
· Consent (to accept the invite)
· Edit (both received invites and sent invites)
· Delete invite (both received invites and sent invites)
Solving complexity of connections
Because the connections could happen 2 ways, it was complex to figure out the information
Feedback from our customers and other designers
We showed our main request flow to other designers during our design review, and also showed it to some of our customers through customer calls, and got feedback. Below was the prototype we showed.
Design review
Most of the feedback was on the wording of “Received tenant invitation”, and “Sent tenant invitation”.
The feedback was that the term “invitation” itself could feel weird because once a connection is established, it’s not an invitation anymore, and becomes a “connection”. Also, “connection” is more 2 way.
And because of the word “invitation”, users might get confused on where to initiate the connection and where to go to consent.
Using the same noun with 2 different verbs seemed confusing
Suggestion on using “Inbound connection, and “Outbound connection
Customer call/ cog walk
Our PM, Elizabeth, did customer calls as Jodene (senior designer), and I also participated in the meeting to get feedback from customers. Below were the 3 main task questions that were asked to our customers while showing our clickable prototype
Tasks
Send invitation
Imagine you’re an admin at Wingtip Toys, and you want to enable a couple groups at Woodgrove to have access to your resources. Where would you start?
Consent
Imagine you’re an admin at Woodgrove, and the admin at Wingtip Toys says they need you to accept an invitation for a couple of your groups to access their resources. Where would you start?
Delete
Now the partnership between Wingtip Toys and Woodgrove is ending and you want to remove access to your resources for the users from Woodgrove. Where would you start?
Customer feedback
Customers struggled with the navigation wordings as the terms were not clear for the users
Out of the 3 different task questions, our customers were fine with the other flows but the request flow. Below was the request prototype we showed to our customers. The part they struggled with was, the navigation. Which was also the part we got feedback from during our previous design review. The customers were perfectly fine with “organizational relationships”, but were not sure after that, and struggled between, “Identity providers”, and “Sent invitations”.
Customer A
· One person thought to go to “Identity providers” but later agreed to “sent invitation”
· The other person definitely thought “sent invitations” although thought it was “send” invitations and not “sent”
Customer B
· Interprets “Sent tenant” as already sent, past invitations.
Customer C
· Would go to organizational relationships, then identity provider.
· Would go to organizational relationships and then if there were”Tenant relationships” would select that
Design Iterations
With the feedback we got from both the design team and from customers, I did more explorations on design options to create a better version of our prototype for usability testing.
Exploration #1
Tried the idea of “Invitations”, and “Connections”, to clarify and differentiate invitations to connections already established.
Exploration #2
All in one “Directory relationships”, and accommodate the tab design
Some feedback from our team included
· Uncertain what “Directory relationships” means. Suggested “Invitations”
· Also suggested keeping previous menu UI and adding “Invite” as a menu item
· How about flat list combining Sent and Received – instead of using tabs
Exploration #3
Navigation wording including the word “Connections”
Other design explorations
This project was an ongoing project for over 6 months and there were many iterations along the way. Below are some of the other design explorations for this project.
Notification
These were explorations to figure out a way to notify the customers about alerts that the users would need to know for actions that need to be taken
Help text
Because there were a lot of fields and information needed from the users, we wanted to put help text to make sure the users would understand the correct information that they would have to put. We wanted to put help text, and there were some explorations for the design.
