MANASI HUKKU
SENIOR UX DESIGNER
Improving discoverability on our Telco SAAS platform via a navigation redesign
INTRO
Circles.co is a Singapore-based global technology company that provides telco operators with a powerful and flexible code-free SAAS platform.
This helps:
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Operators to align rapidly with market app flows by enabling, disabling, or adding conditional logic to journey steps—all within a code-free SAAS backend.
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To manage their CRM, products, services, etc...
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To tailor and personalise offerings or introduce new products for their customers, and
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Operators can manage regional settings based on compliance, telco regulations, and cultural nuances.
OBJECTIVE
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Operators should be able to complete an entire customer onboarding or issue resolution process within one section.
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Sections appear in groupings of frequently performed tasks.
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Navigation should be dynamic based on a user's role.
MY ROLE
Operator portal audits
Card sorting exercises with multiple stakeholders
Information architecture framework
Nav mapping
UX design
Before
PROBLEM
The Operator portal navigation faced 3 main issues:
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Related workflows are scattered across different sections,
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Every user sees the same overwhelming 17-item menu items regardless of their role.
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Current architecture requires costly customisation for each new market instead of being modular and configurable like LEGO blocks.
AN OPPORTUNITY
How might we enhance the operator navigation experience to align with operator roles and mental models, ensuring faster access and logical grouping of sections?
FIRST STEP
I conducted a mind-mapping exercise of the current operator portal navigation to strategically identify relationships, gaps, and redundancies.
NEXT STEP
I conducted moderated card sorting exercises with key operator personas to generate data-driven insights into their mental models and most frequent tasks.
Card sorting exercises revealed our personas key mental models. Keeping these in mind, I started looking at the navigation with the following lenses:
Task-flow lens:
Group by common user journeys such as customer onboarding, issue resolution, billing cycles.
Frequency lens:
Most-used functions such as Orders, Customers, Products, etc... get prime real estate.
Dependency lens:
Related functions that users typically access together should be grouped.
Role-based lens:
Navigation views dynamically adapt to different user roles.
THE NEW NAVIGATION ARCHITECTURE IS BASED ON:
Core Principles:
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Least Privilege: Users see only what they need for their role
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Granularity: Control access at a fine-grained level (e.g., specific features, data, actions).
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Simplicity: Keep the configuration and management of roles and permissions as straightforward as possible.
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It’s Auditable: Track who changed what and when, for security and compliance.
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Scalability: The system must handle growth in users, roles, and features without becoming unwieldy.
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Market Adaptability: While aiming for a blanket solution, allow for market-specific overrides or additions where absolutely necessary (but with guardrails).
Design Approach:
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Tiered Role-based access (RBAC) with centralised management
Global/Platform Level Roles: Pre-defined roles with common permissions (E.g.; Admin/ Super Admin, Marketing Manager, PM, Operations, Customer Support, Shipping) -
Market-Specific Overrides/Additions: Controlled customisation at the market level.
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Permission Sets: Grouping individual permissions into reusable sets.
Based on the new architecture, I mapped the existing navigation to the new navigation.
NEW ROLE-BASED NAVIGATION
NAVIGATION WITH SEARCH and KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
