Setting up a user or customer federation (single sign-on) for an enterprise application is a crucial next step for a growing business that is using that application. Customers in need of this feature are often growing at a fast rate and need to start scaling their business. Creating and properly setting up a federation helps our customers get to that point, which leads to further adoption of the MongoDB Atlas product.

However, when the setup is confusing MongoDB Atlas looks unreliable and becomes harder to use. Our customers that are using our product would often be running into these issues. Customers would not properly set up their own federation and SSO, which lead to other issues; such as getting locked out of MongoDB or not granting access to their colleagues within their own company.

This issue was brought to our design team’s attention due to the number of support tickets that were being created, and how much time our own team members would have to spend just supporting these customers.

As with most projects that have a problem to solve, our team goes into research and speaks directly to customers. Our approach to this was to reach out to customers that have filed support case tickets, speak to our customer success managers or technical account managers about any issue related to their customer federation setup. Here is where we had a pool of customers to do 1-hour long interviews asking them about what their process was, what their pain points were, and any other feedback relating to their federation setup.

After our research sessions, I gathered and organized the insights and trends that we heard from customers. This was organized through documentation of raw notes, clipping interview recordings together, and then creating a presentation of these insights to present back to our stakeholders.

After our stakeholders heard the feedback directly from customers. it was given that this issue needed to be addressed and that an initiative and product descriptions were to be started.

I addressed and highlighted what I thought to be the key issues that were found from the research:

• Customers were not able to finish completing their Identity Provider setup.

• Customers would be locked out of MongoDB Atlas due to not setting up properly.

• Customers were unaware of the order of steps that needed to be taken to properly set up a federation and SSO.

With the insights and trends that the team was now aware of, I blocked out some time during our week to brainstorm some ideas on how to approach this issue. I hosted a design studio with our product managers, engineers, and another designer where we would sketch out ideas using our research as a starting point.

After sketching, presenting, and prioritizing, the best approach that we felt, in the end, was to create a wizard or a how-to set up guide for a customer’s federation and SSO. We felt that this was the best approach (as most customers would be familiar with this experience); the goal was to make it foolproof for any customer that can follow the steps that we spell out for them.

With this new approach, I wanted to create a central Overview page that was home to the guided setup and also another navigation point to each of their federation settings.

With these new designs, I created an easy way to access each of the different customer federation settings, documentation on the right side for any questions, and another way to redo the guided federation setup.

I also created a component that would follow our users during the setup to give them instructions on what to do for the current step, how to get to the next step, and also remember what the previous step was. This component on the bottom left corner of their screen would help give context to our customers on which step they were on and how many were left.

Before releasing this new feature to the general public I tested it with our new and existing customers to gather feedback. I’ve also reached back out to those that have spoken with us before and tested it with them as well. Overall, the consensus to these new designs was that it was easier to set up, was a lot more clear on what the next steps were, and much more organized than the previous designs. We helped address all of the major issues that customers had shared with us from research.

Impact after release

The biggest impact of this project was the reduction of customer federation-related cases regarding their setup. Support cases that were related to this issue were reduced from 24% to just 8% after 3 months of its release.

The other major impact this project had was within our own MongoDB organization, where the amount of time CSMs and TAMs had to spend with customers resolving this specific issue decreased by almost 60%.