Circuit Design for Telecom Engineers : UI Design

One of the largest Australian telecommunications companies that provides both local and long distance telephone services, mobile services, dialup, wireless, DSL and cable internet access in Australia and China. The company is one of Australia's top 10 listed companies, and is a Fortune 500 company.

The problem

Many Communications Service Providers' settings require a circuit design process to link customer’s buildings into joined network. The client realized that they urgently needed to increase a number of processed orders per day. Current process was full of numerous pages with uncorrelated data that must be linked by hand. Current process comprised numerous pages with uncorrelated data that must be linked by hand. Circuit designer has to pass through 6 separate windows to select different objects – circuits, ports and IP, and associate them together. Ongoing close collaboration with designers showed they wasted time opening and closing pages, made mistakes transferring data between windows, overloaded memory and performed extra mental work doing all steps by hand. The system did not provide any logic and context rules to create circuit infrastructure automatically.

Our solution

Since the circuit design process was strongly algorithmic in sequence and data type, we suggested putting all required data at one page. In each next field user selects data from the context list depends on previous one. By “Create” button he associates all selected objects at once and builds up a network as a completed set of maintenance. Now user can evidently controls integrated data without shifting pages. In addition to delivering new interaction and visual design, we provided business insights into telecom engineers needs.

Results

Compared to the previous system, our solution matched the designer's mental model and automated typical activities simultaneously. It reduced the number of pages from 6 to 1, eliminated typical mistakes of data lost and disconnections, and simplified task completion with considerably better satisfaction levels.