Increasing enterprise portal adoption by 25% by giving customers one place to manage all their communications

Wavecell (now 8x8) built enterprise communication products: SMS, chat apps, video interaction, and voice. Each had been designed and developed independently. A design prototype broke years of organisational gridlock and got a unified portal shipped.

The problem

Enterprise users managing multi-channel campaigns were logging into four separate portals every day. No shared dashboard. No unified view of usage across products. No way to manage contacts, billing, or settings in one place.

The company knew this. Discussions about a unified portal had been going for years. Nothing had moved because the solution was too abstract to get executive alignment. Every conversation stalled at the same point: stakeholders could agree the problem existed but could not agree on what solving it would actually look like. That is a specific kind of organisational failure. The blocker was not technical. It was representational.

Constraints

Four product teams with separate codebases and separate data models. No dedicated frontend team for portal work. And executive alignment had already failed through verbal proposals. Any solution needed to be tangible enough to make the decision concrete, not just comprehensible.

Process

The first decision: show options, not a prescription.

The instinct in this situation is to come in with a single recommendation. I chose not to. The problem space was genuinely unclear: four products with different interaction patterns, different user types, and different data structures. Prescribing one approach without exploring the range would have been a guess dressed as a decision.

I facilitated a workshop with the Product Manager, Engineering Head, and internal domain experts. We mapped user journeys across all four products to identify what was shared: contacts, user management, payments, APIs, settings. Then I designed three distinct UI concepts, each with a documented case for advantages and disadvantages.

The tradeoff: running three concepts in parallel took longer than a single-path approach. We accepted that cost because the alternative was shipping a unified portal that half the organisation disagreed with.

The second decision: resolve the internal debate with user evidence.

Rather than letting the three-concept debate run inside the company, we launched an MVP and ran surveys with internal staff and existing users across departments. The majority chose Option 3 for its straightforward navigation approach.

That user signal did what weeks of internal debate had not: it gave leadership a specific basis for a decision. I presented the concept eight times across the company to reach alignment. The prototype, not the argument, is what moved people.

We ran 8 to 10 rounds of usability testing before shipping the final UI, which went through more than 10 wireframe iterations.

The third decision: ship single login first.

Single login was technically the simplest change and the highest-visibility one. Before the portal launched, enterprise users managing multiple products had separate credentials for each. Consolidating to a single entry point removed daily friction in a way users noticed immediately. Shipping it first created adoption signal early and made the case for the larger portal investment.

What shipped

A unified multichannel customer portal with a shared dashboard showing usage data across all four products. A single login entry point replacing four separate credential systems. Unified contact management, user administration, and billing. Navigation that persisted across product contexts so users could move between SMS, chat, video, and voice without starting over.

It was the first time a Wavecell customer could see their entire relationship with the company in one place.

What I learned

Nobody could solve this problem with words. A design prototype cut through the abstraction and made alignment possible. When leadership was only hearing descriptions of the concept, they were overwhelmed by scope. The prototype made the solution concrete and gave people something specific to react to, accept, or reject.

If I did this again, I would introduce the prototype earlier, before the internal workshop rather than after it. The workshop surfaced the problem space well. But we could have saved weeks of internal debate by putting a rough prototype in front of stakeholders at the start, not after three polished concepts had been developed.