Scaling products through admin experiences
Power Platform admin center is the unified platform for IT administrators to manage multiple Microsoft services, including Dynamics 365, PowerApps, Power Automate, and more.
Overview
The new admin platform merged multiple admin centers into one and served different types of admins. It posed a few challenges:
First, each of the admin centers had its own design language, terminology, concepts, and back-end infrastructure. We had to align them not only visually and conceptually, but also make it work seamlessly regardless of the engineering limitations.
Second, the new portal meant to serve multiple admin personas: from the global admins, who need to configure a database for their organization, to maker admins, who create low-code applications within PowerApps and need to manage them.
Business goal
Merge multiple admin portals into one and create a go-to destination for different types of admins. The new portal should help to scale the emerging product capabilities and help the products stay competitive.
Role and duration
Lead designer for several areas of the platform. The design team had 3 other designers, a manager, content designer, and researcher. I worked closely with several product managers and a few engineering teams.
January 2018 - December 2019
Admins don’t go to the admin center just for fun
They configure, manage, and monitor their resources. In the context of this platform, resources are all existing applications, data connectors, logical flows, AI models, chatbots, databases, and more. Some admin personas need to understand the big picture of where these resources are located, how much storage they use, and how they are used. Other admins care only about a few applications and additions they created.
We conducted user studies, reviewed telemetry, aligned terminology, and talked to developers from multiple teams to understand implemetation challenges. We had multiple iterations before we landed with the optimal solution. We found a place for the bird’s-eye view primarily for global admin and an in-context view for maker admins.
Database hub
Before the new admin center, all information about environments (databases) was scattered around multiple portals. We worked toward creating an overview of the environment to help admins understand its state before jumping into the task. We conducted several user studies to layout and prioritize information.
Issue deflection
Another common task for admins is issue troubleshooting, and the only option before was filing support requests. For the new admin center, one of the business goals was to reduce the number of requests but keep the quality of the support. From the design perspective, we aimed to achieve this by categorizing issues, digging into the data of the most common issues, providing troubleshooting steps and relevant documentation, and monitoring customer feedback.
Impact
May 2018 - March 2019
Conclusion
Merging different worlds into one unified experience takes a lot of time, patience, and collaboration between multiple teams. The old platforms will be gradually deprecated, and defining new solutions will have its challenges and many iterations. However, this new and coherent experience is just the beginning that will enable the next billion of Power Platform users.