Saviynt Blog | Security News and Research

Building a UX-Driven Organization

Written by Chad Maxwell | Jul 26, 2023 7:00:00 AM
Start with Customers. Then Design > Engineer > Deliver

If you’re like everyone else in 2023, you’ve entered “definition of UX” in your favorite search engine at some point. And you’ve found that there are several similar ways that people spin it. But no matter the preferred syntax, the essence of the various definitions is the same. User experience (UX) is all about “how people interact with a product.”

Here at Saviynt, we’re tackling UX in the complex landscape of identity governance and administration (IGA). We see this as an exciting challenge—taking something extremely sophisticated and transforming it into something delightfully simple to use.

But we can’t pull off this transformation alone. We need our customers’ voice. Because at Saviynt, we’re not just about our identity platform, or even UX. We’re about putting our customers at the heart of our experience. Our customers are helping Saviynt become a UX-driven organization.

What’s in the Works?

If you’ve recently onboarded an application in your Saviynt environment, you’ve already gotten a taste of some improvements we’ve made to our product. We introduced a self-service interface where our customers can onboard applications in dramatically less time. Our customers are already seeing some of the value our team brings to the Saviynt experience, so we can put that in the “win” column. But we’re also frequently asked what’s next.

We have regular conversations with our customers, and they have the opportunity to provide feedback on early design concepts that are in the works. The designs we review in those conversations reflect much more sweeping enhancements that we’re making across our platform, so they take a lot more coordination and time to move from concept to live product. Big changes are coming soon, so keep your eyes on these prominent areas of our platform:

 

Our future homepage with unified navigation will put everything important in plain sight.

  • Access Requests: We’re streamlining the entire process to make it easier to request access to applications, faster to find what you need, and simpler to review requests. We’re turning our most frequently used feature into a more elegantly interactive and familiar experience.
  • Certifications: We’re leveraging intelligence to help our customers make faster, better-informed decisions, giving them back more time in their day. But we’re not just helping cut time spent on monotonous tasks. We’re reducing rubber-stamping to improve compliance and decreasing our customers’ exposure to risk.
  • Homepage: When you log in, our product’s first impression is going to be much more impressive. Cleaner, simpler, and easier to know what you need to do.
  • Unified Navigation: We’ve had extensive conversations both internally and externally about how users find their way through our product, and we’re using the guidance of Jakob’s Law to unify our menus and features, so that our customers can navigate our platform like other sites they already know.
  • PAM: Our privileged access management (PAM) features are getting a major overhaul so that our customers have more unified workflows across the entire Saviynt experience. Our primary goals are to reduce clicks and time to task, and to eliminate the need for cheat sheets to request credentials and launch a session.
We’ve gone plaid. We’re on a mission to complete all UX designs by the end of 2023. That’s not a typo.

The Saviynt Platform has taken a decade to get to its current state, so overhauling the grand majority of the UX is ambitious. But we’ve already made major strides, and we’re on track to have all of the designs complete by the end of this year.\

Our future Privileged Access Management designs will provide a flattened, simpler experience.

 

And we’re not designing any of this in a bubble. We’re working in tandem with our customers. At our current pace, these initiatives will be handed off to our engineers very soon. So buckle up…transforming the Saviynt experience is going to be a fast and exciting ride!

Collaborating with Our Customers to Make Our Product Great

The world of identity security is ever-evolving in scale and complexity, so our product has historically been driven by releasing new features to keep up with handling some of the most complicated and consequential business transactions. As a result, our converged identity platform has become extremely feature-rich, with capabilities ranging from Identity Governance and Administration to Privileged Access Management to Application GRC and Intelligent Analytics—to name a few.

Managers will soon be able to review access requests in a more streamlined fashion.

This has been great to boast a product that can do so much and to be recognized by our industry and analysts as a leading IGA solutionHowever, we also have to admit that our customers are right about something else. Despite all the awesome things our product can do, it’s not the easiest to use. That’s where we come in.

The UX team at Saviynt represents our customers and their users with a shared goal of making our capable product user-centric. We’re discovering what our customers truly value. We want to give their end users quick and easy workflows. We’re embracing more colorful visuals and striking contrasts, while meeting WCAG 2.1 standards. We’re increasing the responsive nature of our product across devices. This is our opportunity to make sure that the vast capabilities of our platform meet their intended function—a customer-inspired experience that’s simple, modern and usable.

Our Decisions Are Rooted in Human-Centered Research

We never want to be an IGA provider that changes our product or creates new features on a hunch. We want every decision we make about our next-generation identity governance platform to start with our customers. Are our customers struggling? Do our customers need/want this? What are our customers really asking for?

 

 

Our UX research team serves as a bridge between users (our customers) and the designers, content writers, engineers and product managers who make decisions about our product. We perform research in a number of ways, like conducting customer interviews, engaging in idea-generating workshops, and performing usability testing with internal and external audiences—and all of it is focused on user-centricity. Not every decision weighs the same, so we carefully select the best method to find the right answers.

 

The future of our Certifications will be more streamlined, elegant, and efficient.

The time we spend researching saves us countless hours of spinning our wheels on the wrong solutions down the line. When we engage with real users, we glean fresh perspectives and gain a better understanding of their core needs and concerns, so that we can create products they actually want to use. The result? Better first-time experiences with our product, reduced time to task, and less need to contact our support team.

Partner with UX

We’re putting UX in the driver’s seat here at Saviynt, and we invite you to come along for the ride. So how can you get involved? For starters, you can always sign up to share your ideas with us in the Saviynt Ideas Portal, where there’s no such thing as a bad idea for how we can improve our product.

If you want to take a more active role, join our UX Research Panel so that we can invite you to participate in user testing and workshops. You’ll see design concepts and prototypes before others, and your feedback will help steer us in the right direction. Ready to engage?

Want more? Our next blog is targeted for publishing in September 2023, and we’re going to give you a peek behind the UX team’s curtain and show you some of the work we’re doing. We want you to see how our customers are helping us think differently about our product.