Product Design for Jira addon - Theme Extension

Theme Extension is a Jira Service Management (JSM) addon which allows you to enhance the customization possibilities of JSM Customer Portal. It allows you to change the branding, colors and layout without strong JSM administration skills and without html and css knowledge.

PROBLEM

Lots of companies use Jira and JSM, however, they cannot adapt their customer portal to the branding of their company that they use and which is recognized by their customers. As a result, many companies have to decide on expensive custom solutions or risk the lack of recognition of their brand by customers submitting support requests. Additionally, people responsible for managing the customer portal, lack the skills and time, to use complex solutions that enable customizing their customer portals.

We saw an opportunity to create a product that would allow companies to easily prepare their customer portal and thus improve the experience of the user submitting support requests.

To understand our users needs better, we analyzed both the Theme Extension for JSM existing features and the most popular application available on the Atlassian Marketplace that allows you to customize Customer Portal. It allowed us to understand that both applications require a lot of time, skills and work to customize the portal.We found it overwhelming and time-consuming for some users. Besides, we talked to the users of the Deviniti Customer Portal, which is used in our company to manage all things related to HR and employees. After these "hallway user interviews" it turned out that most userslack the ability to operate the customer portal on mobile devices.

During interviews with clients, partners and people working in our support team, we realized that we were dealing with three types of users:

Jira's administrator, a highly technical person with the time, capabilities and skills to prepare a highly tailored customer portal, supported by a graphic designer and marketing team

Aperson working in the support department, managing a specific customer portal, who lacks the technical skills, time and support of other people to prepare a well-matched customer portal

The third persona isthe customer- many companies complained about the lack of support for displaying customer portals on mobile devices.

Thanks to research, we learned that we needed a tool that could respond primarily to the undeveloped part of the market - people working in the support team. They needed a tool to easily create a portal containing elements of the company's branding, but without using dedicated graphics and a complicated configuration process.

We have to keep the existingCards Themethat allows for high customization of the portal

We need to create anew theme that is easy to configure

The new theme must be configurablewithout the involvement of graphic designers

The new theme must be responsive.

After the research phase we came up with and idea to create a new theme. A theme is a collection of all elements that make up the appearance of the customer portal - layout, colors, and fonts. At this point we had the following goals:

We have to keep the existing Cards Theme

that allows for high customization of the portal

We need to create anew theme that is easy to configure

The new theme must be configurable without the involvement of graphic designers

The new theme must be responsive.

After analyzing the collected information, we decided to create a simple layout based on 2 sections and 5 colors. We wanted it to be responsive and be able to display many request types on one page.

When I knew more or less what our new layout would look like, I started to prepare a configuration scheme that would allow me to configure the invented layout.

CONFIGURATION

This led us to create the first concepts of the configuration screen and the first analysis of how the colors selected by the user would be displayed on the Customer Portal.

We wanted to simplify the setup as much as possible. We wanted a support person having only one color related to the company he works for, to be able to quickly set up the portal. We decided to automate calculating the remaining colors based on one primary color.

After designing the configuration, we tested it with Jira's administrators and people from the support team and checked if it was understandable and easy to pass.

It is definitely worth mentioning that due to the technical limitations resulting from the environment of Jira, not everything is possible to implement.

In retrospect, the automation of color selection turned out to be problematic when we were dealing with a larger number of elements that had to have their own color. We should immediately create a more complicated algorithm to calculate colors on the backend side. Then we could keep the ease of use for the user and it would allow us to use a large amount of colors.

Within 7 months, we managed to create a new product that satisfied our customers. Many of them have started using the new List Theme and based on the feedback we got, they are very pleased with the ease and speed with which they can customize customer portals. Besides, we also receive very positive feedback on the possibility to use the mobile version of the customer portal.

After the release of the application in April 2020, the number of active licenses in the last two years has been tripled (from 45 to around 150 in 2022).