Windstream had a single quoting application for use by its enterprise business unit, its wholesale business unit, and by the external sales partners for each of those units. It was comprehensive, with the ability to quote multiple configurations of every product and service the company offered. However, feedback from salespeople consistently said the application was difficult to understand and use without training, and therefore quotes took too long to generate.

I was leading the UI/UX design for WE Connect Partners, a portal for external sales partners to keep track of their customers, spot sales opportunities, and keep abreast of Windstream’s product catalogue. After a successful launch, the next feature on everyone’s mind was a native quoting tool.

Through discussion with the business—who began with the stated objective of “a native quoting experience that’s easier to use”—I guided stakeholders to three more specific objectives:

• Streamline the quoting experience by only offering the services that the business wants to keep selling.
• Structure the experience as a step-by-step “wizard” to improve user comprehension and make validating user input less cumbersome.
• Speed up the quoting process by only gathering information that affects the price of services, rather than everything needed to configure and activate the services after purchase (which could be gathered after a purchase is made).

Order of Operations

After deciding that the quoting experience should be a step-by-step process, the obvious question was “what are the steps”? The simplest answer was “each product gets a step”, but there were several complicating factors:

• Individual products could need multiple screens of questions, depending how complex the product is to price.
• Some individual products could directly affect one another; certain configurations of one product could change what information is or isn’t required to quote a different product.
• Product configuration is not all that’s needed to quote services. The length of a service contract pertains to every product being quoted.
• Additionally, we need to know the physical addresses where the services are being set up. If the same product is needed at multiple locations, each instance of a product might still have a different configuration.
• Speaking of locations, every address entered into the quoting tool has to be validated before services can be quoted. (This is a matter of availability; not every service is available everywhere.)

Frontend, Backend, and Business Coordination

As I collaborated with the business stakeholders on the individual product screens, the development team discovered that the API we were using to connect to Windstream’s original quoting application didn’t expose all of the data that we had hoped for. Fortunately, the new mockups I was producing had generated a lot of enthusiasm from the business, who prioritized updating the quoting API to deliver what we needed!

Expanding on the Design System

Though the Quoting Tool was intended to be “an application within an application”, and therefore had an existing design system to which it had to adhere, the “parent” application didn’t have many form fields, or guidelines for them. Since this new tool would be heavily form-based, the component library within the design system would have to be built out.

Since I was already working with the stakeholders to determine what questions each product screen would need to ask (and in what order), I also started designing relevant components. Doing these things simultaneously allowed me to design individual components as we learned that we’d need them.

Project Results

Reception to the Quoting Tool was extremely positive both with other business units inside Windstream and with external sales partners.

• Internally, alternate versions of the Quoting Tool selling products appropriate to other business units were adopted and integrated into those units’ respective applications.
• Externally, the Quoting Tool—combined with the streamlined backend processes and API changes that designing it prompted—reduced combined quoting and briefcase time for users by 2–3 weeks.