Partner Connect
Partner Connect feature simplifies the on boarding process through pre-built integrations with Snowflake’s technology partners in ETL , BI and Analytics. User can automatically provision and configure partner applications and start loading data into Snowflake in minutes for immediate analysis.
Design Process : My Role and Responsibilities
As an only designer working on this feature I was involved early in the design process with the Product Manager. To understand the ETL process, the challenges and interests from the partners are the crucial part of laying out the user flow.
After the initial research and talking to customers and a few partners, I started creating the information architecture and the user’s journey map. After few iterations we started polishing visual design and defined interaction patterns. I also collaborated with developers to address the error cases and micro interactions. Below is the design for the landing page for partner connect
How this helps the Users?
Partner Connect makes it easy to create a free trial account with the chosen data integration partner and automatically configure the Snowflake connection. This enables customers to avoid the manual work associated with creating databases and warehouses, and separately provisioning and configuring a partner application. With Partner Connect, customers can get to their data immediately and accelerate time-to-insight.
Information Flow Diagram
After the initial information gathering, we got an understanding of the Partner APIs that Snowflake will receive from the partners, and the integration of it with our application. This initial diagram depicts how the Partner Connect feature will be invoked from the app till the task completion with success or error messages received from the backend
User’s Journey Map
After few initial sketches, reviews and iteration we took the information flow to the next level with the high fidelity design.
Development and Release
This is the version we were able to ship at Aug 2018 as a Public Preview feature. As this is a new feature the release was pretty big announcement via Snowflake Blog, Websites and Social Media. Here’s the youtube video of the feature’s full description.
As only 3 ETL partners were able to build their API during the initial release timeframe, we had to take out the navigation and filtering capability temporarily
Issues to be addressed: The badge got to be changed to only a checkmark with text, as it was impossible to get relevant info from the API to display in the text messages! Legal team came with a lot of disclaimer texts to add, the fly-out screen started to look really cluttered! Also, we immediately felt the need to a centralized container with responsive style for the thumbnails, as there will be less number of partners for a while.
Incremental Improvements
Incorporated a slightly different workflow to remove the fly-out menu. We settled to use the dialog box style again and we needed to remove the user’s ability to cancel the dialog while connecting to reduce confusion. We supported this decision with data as with the existing APIs no connection took longer than 5 sec. We also addressed the issue with the responsiveness and the centralized container.
Here’s the version with exploration, that was in the second release
Incremental Improvements : Email Verification
There is a major area of improvement came out during internal testing, as we need to collect a valid email address to create a partner account, but Snowflake app currently do not always require to have a valid email address. Now, if they do not have a email address in file they need to abandon the Partner Connect Flow to go to the preferences to do this. How to minimize this friction was our next goal to address…
