Debuting Okta's New UX: Focused, Simple and Delightful
The average end user probably doesn’t realize the amount of time and energy that the typical design team puts into defining their values. Our team considers our design principles – focus, simplicity and delight – with every decision we make, and they were certainly not forgotten when designing our new end-user experience (which is now available). To us, focus is about knowing what’s most important to your audience and doing those things really well, whereas simplicity has to do with the individual choices you make that influence ease of use. And delight is where it all comes together – it’s all about making your product a pleasure to use.
As our CEO Todd McKinnon recently discussed in TechCrunch, consumer applications like Uber, Pinterest and Instagram are all just that – a pleasure to use. Our aim when working on the latest update to the Okta UX was to delight our users and make accessing their work just as simple and enjoyable as hailing a ride on Uber. And that goal manifests itself in tactical things like new features.
The best part about these new features? They were all suggested by our customers, truly designed with “people first, technology second” in mind. We didn’t make any changes or updates without feedback – and in the past few months, we’ve been beta testing the new UX with our customers and conducting usability tests with first-time Okta users.
That’s because although design might be subjective, a great user experience – and the emotions attached to it – are becoming more objective. You may not notice the pieces that make your experience amazing right off the bat, but you certainly notice when an app is designed poorly. And with more and more companies taking advantage of customer feedback in addition to usability and retention testing, design is becoming more of a science than an art. That’s something we at Okta are all for.
In order to know we’re truly making our solution a pleasure to use, we need a way of measuring feedback. User testing provides us with a focus around the emotion we’re hoping to elicit; a way to prove Okta’s a pleasure.
So, you can thank our test subjects for our latest updates: better app organization (including the tabs we showed off during March Madness), more opportunity for app customization and faster access to those apps. And those are just a few of the individual choices we made to make accessing work easier than ever and doing it simply. Let us know what you think about the new UX and email [email protected].