Meraki Phone
In May 2016, Cisco Meraki launched their first cloud-managed phone, the MC74. Prior to launch, I was responsible for designing the onboarding experience, including setting up phone service. I worked on the research, interaction design and visual design along with one other designer. Concurrently, I also worked on the phone's UI and designed the click-to-dial Chrome extension.
Research
Meraki had a limited customer beta program running in the months leading up to launch. I visited several customers and observed them as they unboxed and configured new phones. I identified a few pain points we were able to address from these observations:
- Early shipments of the phone required a firmware update before they could be configured, a process that could take hours to complete. Additionally, the phone didn't show any visual indicator that it was updating, leading some to believe it was frozen. To mitigate confusion, we tracked phone orders that needed the update and sent email and Dashboard alerts ahead of delivery.
- You must enter a phone's serial number in order to set it up in your network. Since the serial number is location underneath the phone, users had to turn the device upside down to find and enter it in. To avoid this, we included stickies with serial information in the packaging that also came handy in keeping track of phone assignments.
Service Provider Onboarding
Once I had a good understanding of phone deployments, I focused on the service provider integration. Meraki partnered with VoIP provider Intelepeer so users would be able to sign up for service and order phone numbers through Dashboard.
The configuration flow went through multiple revisions in the weeks leading up to launch, however a simple three step process we desgined early on stuck:
I also met with several IT professionals that are involved with new phone deployments in varying capacities to understand common best practices and issues that arise in the process. I was sketching and iterating on setup flows at the same time and was also able to share my designs with them for useful feedback.
