Windstream’s wholesale unit was getting poor feedback from users about their ability to manage their clients using their existing tools: they were slow, and they were built around a client-centric view. That is, a user would search for a single client record, then drill into individual sections of that record to see everything about that client: their contracts, their services, their open tickets, upsell opportunities, etc.

While that approach gave wholesalers a complete picture of each individual client, it didn’t serve the way they told us that they actually did their jobs: it leaned on a shallow notification system to convey which of their clients needed their attention, and it didn’t do anything to help them anticipate their clients’ needs.

As the lead UI/UX Designer, I worked with the project director to conceive a new object-oriented information architecture in which the key sections of the portal would be the inventory, orders, quotes, and support tickets of all of a user’s customers. This would allow a user to more proactively evaluate their customers’ needs, because the new architecture would forefront both potential problems and opportunities.

But the stakeholder response to our pitch was not what we had hoped.

Stakeholders Divided

Business unit directors were deeply divided in their response:

• Some liked our pitch, and were eager to do away with the old portal entirely, not just because they preferred our proposed information architecture, but because a new foundation presented the opportunity for much needed performance improvements.
• Others bristled at having to learn—and teach!—a whole new portal. They thought adding a page to the existing portal with more detailed notifications could ameliorate the issues user research had uncovered.

Both sides proved intractable. While I searched for a compromise with the stakeholders, the project director put the question to senior management. The decision came back in favor of our pitch. A new portal would be built.

Approved… With New Requirements

Many of the old portal’s performance issues stemmed from the fact that it was showing its age on both the backend and the frontend. When approval for a new one was handed down, it was with two caveats:

• Windstream had just undergone a rebrand. The new portal would be among the first to adhere to the new brand guidelines still in development.
• The fact that a new portal would be a much bigger lift than tweaking an old one would have to be mitigated: the launch date was moved forward by three months.

The team realized that some functionality would have to be outsourced to make the new launch date. Ultimately, quoting would be handled by an integrated third-party tool. This was a bit of a disappointment to me personally (my work in quoting was why I landed the project), but there were still some other areas in which I could innovate.

Object-Oriented Structure

Reflecting our object-oriented UX design, the new portal—“Nexus”—was largely grid-driven: section landing pages were tables full of records calibrated to show what our users would need at a glance based on their feedback and on stakeholders’ learned experience.

Each record in a table had actions that could be taken pertaining to it, e.g. updating a support ticket, changing contact information on an order, or editing the permissions of non-admin users. For the most part this pattern for drilling down into specific objects was clear and predictable.

But there was an exception: date-driven events that had not yet occurred, like upcoming service maintenance. While I was discussing information architecture with the stakeholders, one thing everyone agreed on was that we should forefront individual circuits that were experiencing problems. Looking at that truth in the context of a user flow, we could the realize some other truths:

• If a user has a circuit down, they want to know when it will be back up.
• Circuits can be down for several reasons, only some of which are problems (scheduled maintenance, upgrades, etc.). But down time is still down time, and if Windstream knows it’s coming, the customer should too.

Upon reaching these conclusions, what we needed was obvious: a maintenance calendar.

Project Results

• Nexus was unveiled at a trade show to positive buzz. It was recognized with a 2023 Partner Innovation Award and featured in Fierce Telecom for streamlining wholesale tasks.
• Within its first month, Nexus drove a 30% increase in quoting volume.