04 / Voyant Fax
Summary
Constructed a secure system that enabled non-technical users to transmit confidential information via fax while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.
Project
A user-friendly web portal powered by an API to facilitate the secure exchange of sensitive fax documents.
My Role
UX/UI Design
User Interviewing
Wireframes
User Flows
Usability Testing
Impact
Introduced an intuitive electronic faxing process, increasing task completion rates by 40%.
Partnered with developers to create high-fidelity mockups which reduced iteration cycles by 35% and optimized the design-to-development handoff.
Established regular design reviews, eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating stakeholder approvals.
Guided iteration efforts and improved user satisfaction by addressing 3 key pain points discovered in usability testing.
Company Details
Voyant Communications is an industry-leading unified communications provider backed by a carrier network that reaches nearly 90% of the U.S. population. They offer a portfolio of cloud-based business services including voice, messaging, fax and data. But enough of that jibber-jabber. Let’s talk fax.
Product Details
I know you’re thinking, "Who even faxes anymore?" The necessity for fax comes down to one thing: compliance. While email clients are sufficient enough for most people to send and receive information, this method is not in compliance with HIPAA rules and regulations. That’s where faxing comes in and the reason why the people who need it, really need it. Hospitals, banks and schools all rely on facsimile to transmit billions of pages of confidential information every year. Voyant Fax is a web portal that offers a user-friendly way to achieve this virtually and with efficiency.
Product Goals
Adapt existing API fax capabilities into an accessible platform
Focus on creating flows tailored to nontechnical users
Construct varying levels of access and permissions across the portal
Enable digital faxing without disruption by mirroring manual processes
Implement rules to meet compliance requirements
Behind the scenes of the Voyant Fax web portal is an API. While powerful, this API requires a fair amount of technical knowledge and understanding to operate. The complexity often results in needing the assistance of an IT manager, engineer or tech savvy specialist at companies from nontechnical industries. Since anyone could ostensibly need to send a fax, there is a gaping hole of opportunity to extend our faxing capabilities to a larger audience.
The Voyant Fax web portal leverages the API’s adeptness while offering a simple user interface to initiate the same calls and functions. Buttons, steppers and confirmation messages lead the user through flows to complete these actions without even having to think about it.
Discovery
Since we were building the portal from scratch, the first step was to speak with potential users to get a better idea of what they might be looking for. Conducting one-on-one interviews allowed me to develop potential use cases and scenarios to keep in mind. After gathering valuable feedback and feeling much more informed, I felt ready to move onto the next phase of our fax exploration.
We decided to hold an offsite design sprint with the product team and subject matter experts. We started the week with a broad idea and spent each day narrowing the scope and defining what should be included in v1. We leveraged affinity mapping, storyboarding, sketching and wireframing to develop our purpose and direction.
Primary functions:
Faxing: ability to send and receive faxes
Fax tracking: dashboard to display fax activity and status
Roles: admin and user accounts with different levels of access
Numbers: allow fax numbers to be purchased and assigned
Secondary functions:
Groups: ability for multiple accounts linked to a single fax number
Admin log: compilation of all user activity within organization
Fax log: live record of all incoming and outgoing faxes within an organization
Number inventory: register of all numbers and assignments
Demo & Usability Testing
After compiling our initial feature set, I hunkered down to build out high fidelity screens based on the sketches and wireframes from our design sprint. Before any of the portal was developed, I wanted to test our assumptions to ensure that we were taking the best approach.
To my delight, there was a customer so interested in our product that they wanted to see a demo from the prototype, even though none of the portal had yet been built. I ventured out to West Virginia University to provide a presentation and run in-person usability tests with five individuals who would be active users. I arrived armed with my official test plan, script and meeting schedule. Each of the sessions was recorded for reference, accompanied by detailed notes on the participants’ reactions.
Synthesizing Results
The usability test recordings and notes came in handy as I could revisit each with renewed focus. I was then able to pick out three main topics that would benefit from further iteration:
Improved search: searching and sorting capabilities will be heavily depended upon right from the start so I needed to work with the developers to optimize them as much as possible
Directory service integrations: ability to sync with an existing catalogue of users such as Active Directory
Emails notifications: alerts of incoming faxes sent to users via email should be branded and easy to read
This process also uncovered some new feature requests that had not yet been considered or discussed:
Managers: an intermediary role that allows less access than an admin, but more access than an end user
Departments: a way to divide an organization into smaller segments to be overseen by a manager
This request was borne from a use case the university was anticipating in which they would prefer all of the onus not be on a single administrator. It introduced a new persona into our original assessment of potential users. We took careful measures before determining that the feature should be included in the second version of the product to avoid scope creep in the MVP.
MVP Launch
Following one final technical feasibility review with our engineering group, we landed on our minimum viable product with a date to release. We knew we had done our research and felt confident that we would be presenting a cohesive, structured product that would solve a common problem.
Meanwhile, we were well on our way to the next round of features.
Customer requests:
Managers/departments: another layer of access and permissions
Cover page: detail page sent along with a fax to provide additional information and security measures
Resend invite: if a user did not receive an invitation from account creation, triggered to send again
SSO: single sign on for authentication when logging in
In-flight webhooks: instead of needing to manually reload a page to see refreshed data, it was pushed and updated automatically
Expansions & improvements:
Whitelabeling: allowing partners and VARs to add their own branding when selling the product to their customers
ATAs: analogue telephone adapters that allow our product to interact with an old-school fax machine
Fax to email: users have the ability to send faxes directly from their own email client
Number porting: customers may bring their existing batch of phone numbers instead of needing to buy new ones through the platform
Empty states: all pages without logs or data on them provide useful information or next steps
After our platform was launched, Voyant Communications was rebranded as Inteliquent*, requiring an update of the portal’s logo, color scheme and design patterns.
I took the initiative to pair the rebrand with a migration of all working files from Sketch/Invision/Zeplin to Figma. This transition required that symbols be converted to components and all hotspots be reprogrammed.
While it was a heavy lift, I wanted to expand my skillset, encourage collaboration and downsize to a single end-to-end platform. Overall, it was a beneficial change for all product and dev individuals.
Roadmap
We continue to iterate on this portal every day to make it more and more in line with our customers’ needs. In the future, we have plans to tackle the following:
Address book: name and store frequently used fax numbers that can be accessed from a dropdown menu when composing a fax
Packages: customers can sign up for different levels of usage best suited for their amount of faxing activity
Tagging: mark faxes with tags to associate them with others
Bulk upload: even if a customer does not have a directory service, this will still enable them to add their users all at once
*I was originally hired by Voyant Communications and assigned to work on the previously-acquired Phaxio product. Voyant was merged with and absorbed by its parent company, Inteliquent, in 2020. Inteliquent was then acquired by Sinch in 2021. This is the reason for any confusion in company name, logo or representation in my portfolio and professional profiles.
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