How I designed a B2C platform for remote monitoring & device management for CPEs
Introduction
To design web-based B2C industrial tool for a leading OEM for remote monitoring and management platform solution addressing strategic business grade CPEs.
Our OEM partner had no dedicated portal for its business-grade CPE fleet — support and field teams worked directly against the raw TR-069/ACS backend and exported data into spreadsheets to get anything done. We were brought in to design the first purpose-built EMS platform: one place to both monitor device health and act on devices, at fleet scale.
The Challenge
UX Process
Learning the domain before designing it…
Reviewed established TR-069/CWMP-based ACS & EMS tools, telecom NOC dashboards, and ISP self-care portals to map existing patterns and gaps.
- Built for Engineers, not operators
- Monitoring and control live apart
- Bulk firmware is a known risk point
- Journeys are replacing parameter dumps
User Interviews
Talking to the people who’d live in this tool — 9 interviews across three roles — remote and on-site — during weeks 1–3 of discovery.
- 4 Support Specialists — “I don’t need every parameter — I need to know if THIS customer’s box is broken.”
- 3 Field Operation Engineers — “Bulk pushes scare me. One wrong profile and it’s thousands of homes.”
- 2 Admin/Profile Managers — “I copy MAC addresses across five tabs just to check a firmware version.”
User Personas
Wireframes Creation for the first discussion with Client…(Low Fidelity Wireframes)
The artboards you will see are the very first explorations of the discussion points which me with my team had with the engineers of what they are specifally looking for. The agenda for this was very simple, to show are we moving in the right direction and our understanding is the same as what they are expecting or we are deviating from the base.
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This was the most important step for any UX designer because after this any change with respect to the base of the design tool will impact the whole process, timeline and approvals…
Empathising a engineer’s mind while he/she works on the tool…
Key Final Decision
After long hour discussion and intial drafts were shown to the client, taking all the pointers and considerations with respect to the technical parameters. Finally, It was decided there will be two parts of this tool i.e.
- Device Management Portal — Remote management portal Enabling users to carry out operations remotely for an individual CPEs as well as group of CPEs (bulk operations). Firmware Management, Ad-hoc GTE/SET interactions, Device Search, Task Manager (Audit log — Admin user), Profile Management.
- Telemetry Portal — Remote Monitoring portal with Dashboards to show Real time aggregated views for telemetry data.
Final Design
Final Verdict
As a UX designer, I learned that if you start something from scratch don’t just jump into the design. Learn from the ground level about what are you going to do when things doesn’t work out as to understand from an engineer and incorporate the thoughts into design can be challenging.
But challenges makes it much more fun and gives you great learnings on the way…
Connect with me on LinkedIn for feedback & suggestions as they are highly appreciated.
