Perpetual Licenses to Subscription Conversion
End-to-end design of converting perpetual licenses into subscription for VMware distributors and resellers
Background
VMware distributors and resellers did not have the option to do self-service conversion for perpetual licenses to subscription. The current process at the time was mainly over email and phone, which involved a lot of man hours from both VMware account reps and the partners. VMware Cloud Partner Navigator (CPN) is an unified platform for VMware partners to manage subscriptions, customers, and deliver multi-cloud services. And our team was tasked to enable the ability to convert licenses to subscription from CPN itself.
My Role
End-to-end design
New patterns
Co-led a research study
Interaction and visual design
Challenges and Thinking Process
Determine the Steps
One of the first challenges was nailing down the number of steps needed to complete this transaction. At the time, we had a default timeline pattern of identical three steps for most flows that involved the Configurator. And I had to decide if we needed the pattern to become a flexible structure instead of forcing the conversion flow into what the existing steps.
Where to place the entry point
There were a few different opinions as to where this flow would begin, since there were no precedence before this project. The contenders were Subscription, Configurator, and a new tab, Perpetual Licenses. The version we showed at usability study had the entry point under Subscription, because internally, the product team called this action “Subscription Upgrade.” But the usability study proved that this was unintuitive, and none of the 6 participant groupings found it successfully. And every single one of them suggested to put the entry point in Configurator.
Note
Due to a non-disclosure agreement, I will not be able to share the full details of the project here. If you’d like to learn more about my process and design rationale, feel free to reach out directly.