The Client

Carbonite is a data backup and protection service provider that offers cloud/server backup, migration, and recovery solutions.

The Brief

Carbonite’s mid-market partner program has gone through many changes prior to this project, including a redesign & re-platform onto Relayware (a partner relationship management software). Unfortunately, Relayware was not a scalable solution and led to complications and a poor user experience - on average, users were spending less than 2 minutes on the portal.

In addition to migrating the partner portal onto Episerver, Carbonite wanted to make sure the new design was strategic and catered to their partners’ needs. Beyond streamlining and making sure transactional actions were easy to accomplish, Carbonite also wanted to explore other content opportunities to promote user engagement.

Audience

Mid-market sales and technical partners. These partners sell or build Carbonite solutions for other businesses.

Solution

• Through partner interviews and persona development, we better understood the goals and needs of Carbonite’s sales and technical partners. By doing so, we ensured that the end design of the portal was strategic and could prove useful for their audience.

• We streamlined existing key transactional flows for registering an account, registering a deal, and getting certified.

• We defined a new site structure and taxonomy system that better mapped to their partners’ goals.

Client: 
Carbonite

Business Model: 
B2B

Team:
  •  Strategy – Brendon Buckley
  •  Analytics – Cora Lin
  •  UX – Jess Chow, Meredith Sloan
  •  Visual Design – Steve Yaffe, Voice & Reason
  •  Creative Direction – Laura Tirado
  •  Front-end Dev – Ryan Brooks, Patrick Connors
  •  Back-end (Episerver) Dev – Tim Dufour, Matt Schroer
  •  Production – Mary-Ann DiThomas, Nicole Heffernan
  •  Account – Joanna Field

UX Deliverables:
  •  Task/System Workflows
  •  Sitemap
• Taxonomy
  •  Wireframes
  •  Functional Specification

Approach

As a first step, we conducted stakeholder interviews to uncover Carbonite’s primary goals that would define success for the new portal.

Through user (partner) interviews, we developed persona segments, where we outlined scenarios and content that would map to their needs. From there, the strategist conducted a scoring exercise to determine content and conversion interests, which ultimately helped me determine content priority for each persona during UX design.

View Strategic Summary

Strategic Recommendations

Through stakeholder interviews, partner interviews and persona development, we uncovered 5 key strategic themes:

1. Create “sales playbooks” - intelligent, personalized packages of sales enablement content that can support partners through their sales process.

2. Streamline the permissions model from 65+ different permutations to focus on the core 7 personas, with secondary segmentation. Personalize content to these core personas based on their profiles in Salesforce.

3. Learning content, such as training & certifications, is not a top desire for most partners. Ensure that partners can easily and quickly achieve certification and that learning content does not cause friction in the user journey.

4. Create a dashboard experience that surfaces the most relevant content to partners. They have limited time and need a quick and efficient experience.

5. Regionalization and translation need to be considered. Ensure taxonomy aligns to each region so that related content can be surfaced and suppressed according to the specific interests and desires of regional partners.

Task/System Workflows

There were 3 key task/system flows that needed to be outlined for the development team to ensure that we are not only streamlining these processes from a UX perspective, but that we were also clearly outlining where there would be technical integrations, since data will be living in disparate areas.

1. Register an account - when does a Salesforce request get created? When does an email get triggered?

2. Register a deal - when does a lead become an opportunity and when does that get updated in Salesforce? When does Carbonite get a notification for approval or rejection?

3. Get Certified - how does information about specializations/certifications get passed through from Classmarker to Epi/Salesforce?

Taxonomy

As we established the site structure, we began to think about content relationships - and started to define a taxonomy system for the portal.

It was important to think through categories that mapped to different mindsets. For example, for partners who are familiar with Carbonite, allow them to filter content by product. For partners who are not, allow them to filter content by solution - with language that is more easily understandable. We also had to ensure to think through facets for certification, training, resources, etc.

View Taxonomy

Interactive Wireframe Prototype

Because this was a transactional portal, it was important to create wireframes for every single page, to make sure that specific content, functionality, and integration points were defined on a page-by-page basis. Another UX designer and I created a total of 71 responsive wireframes for Day 1 launch.

View Wireframes

Functional Specification

To hand off to the development team, I put together functional specifications that clearly defined the intended functionality of each element on every page, in a component-based approach.

View Functional Specification