Ca xflow
CA IT Service Management (CA ITSM) is essential for IT analysts, enabling them to prioritize work and deliver exceptional customer service by managing service requests, incidents, and changes. In this project, I reimagined the ITSM Dashboard feature of their tool's experience to shift the focus from forcing analysts to work around the tool to aligning it with their natural goals and objectives. This redesign was aimed at enhancing their working behavior, empowering analysts to prioritize effectively and concentrate on what truly matters in their daily tasks.
Understanding the problem
The existing CA ITSM Dashboard presented several challenges that hindered IT analysts' efficiency and effectiveness:
Complex Interface: The cluttered and unintuitive interface made it difficult for analysts to navigate and manage tasks, often leading to inefficiencies and errors.
Ineffective Ticket Layout: Tickets were displayed in a way that made it hard for analysts to prioritize their work effectively, as they were presented as sheet rows that lacked clarity.
Lack of Real-Time Updates: Analysts had to resort to off-tool workarounds due to the inability to quickly capture notes and changes as tickets evolved. The Service Level Agreements (SLA) couldn't update fast enough to reflect these changes.
Recognizing these challenges inspired me to reimagine the CA ITSM Dashboard experience with a focus on dynamic and holistic UX/UI design. The redesigned dashboard ensures that tickets are always up-to-date, enabling analysts to effectively prioritize their daily tasks without the need for constant queue management or frequent team check-ins.
Discovery & Research
Customer-centric approach:
The redesign was based on comprehensive feedback from top customer profiles. My team and I concentrated on determining the type of data users needed and how to convert that data into actionable insights for their daily tasks. We conducted field studies at customer sites to observe their daily interactions with customers, tools, and team members.
Analyzing usage patterns on CA ITSM, I identified key metrics like customer profiles, priority, and SLAs as crucial for task prioritization and user experience. The main key takeaway was the analysts lack of context becomes difficult to understand what is happening in their environment.
“What do I need to work on first?” became a theme from many sessions. These insights guided the redesign to better align with analysts' needs and improve their workflows.
Prototyping & Design
Ideation and Brainstorming:
As part of the ideation phase, I led the team to revisit legacy concepts within the CA ITSM tool to understand how previous solutions were implemented. This historical perspective allowed us to ground ourselves in the tool’s evolution and avoid past pitfalls in the redesign, then we could generate ideas for the redesign. We spent 1 design sprint to come up with multiple new concepts, then narrowed down to 2 strongest ones to validate with the customers.
The Ticket Card Concept
Through our research, we learned that analysts are customer service advocates who happen to work in IT; they love helping people. Traditional ITSM tools focused on tracking tickets rather than resolving customer issues. My design goal was to shift that focus to the customer.
I introduced the ticket card design, which became an industry-forward concept. The ticket card view enhances customer focus by providing more context and enabling analysts to take immediate actions without drilling down into ticket details.
The Weather Concept
In our research, we found that service management professionals gathered in formation in fragmented ways, often lacking the context needed for effective solutions. Analysts relied heavily on manual tasks outside the system.
To address this, I developed the “weather” concept–a scoring system based on data from the analysts’ own queue, team queues, and the environment. This provided actionable insights, helping analysts focus on priorities with a clear understanding of their tasks.
Although initial data visualizations were confusing, after five iterations, I simplified it to a text-and-icon interface that effectively conveyed key information at a glance. The weather feature gives analysts the context they need to start the day confidently, aware of what's happening within their organization. As things change, alerts help them adjust their focus to meet the most critical needs.
The Heat Concept
Also from the research, the analyst struggle to figure out what to work on next.
In their queue and requests, they often don’t know what the most important ticket is, so they resort to work on the most easy ones, for example, fixing password resets.
To solve this problem, I designed the “Heat” concept, a idea borrowed from a company with the same name but elevated to the idea of creating the importance of a ticket based on variety factors configured by each organization and SLA, such as: the age of the ticket, priority, SLA, as well as factor from certain customer like VIP status.
With Heat, the tickets are ranked automatically from high to medium, the most important ones flow to the top and the least at the bottom. The queue will be updated throughout the day as Heat tickets change.
Heat adds to help provide the right context for the analyst to support their customers and orgs more effectively.
Conclusion
The redesign of the CA ITSM system marked a key milestone in my mission to deliver intuitive and innovative service tools.Positive user feedback led to an NPS score 8.5 out of 10 in the first year, coinciding with the launch of the newly named Ca xFlow.This redesign not only regained industry leadership, winning the IT Innovation Award, but also laid the foundation for future innovations. The transformation of the ITSM features highlight my commitment to user-centric design and innovation at Ca Tech, empowering users with better tools that power their lives and others.
