Voyant Fax

Methods: 

user interviews, design sprint, usability testing

Tools: 

Sketch, InVision, Zeplin, Figma, Atlassian

Deliverables:

sketches, wireframes, clickable prototypes, user flows, hi-fi mockups

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.

The Challenge

I know what you’re thinking. Who even faxes anymore? To be completely honest, that’s what I wondered, as well. What I learned is that the necessity 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. They need a user friendly way to achieve this virtually and efficiently.

The 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

API docs

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.

Web portal

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.

Main functionality:

• 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

Stretch goal functionality:

• 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 organization

• Number inventory: register of all numbers and assignments

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 5 individuals who would be active users. I arrived armed with my official test plan, script and meeting schedule. I recorded each of the sessions for reference and took detailed notes on the participants’ reactions, excited to share them with my team.

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.

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 their invitation from the original create account flow, it may be trigger 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 can be 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

As this product is ever changing, check back soon for more updates.

There’s nothin’ like a good cliffhanger, am I right?