FortiPresence

Project Overview

FortiPresence is an enterprise platform that provides visitor analytics and captive portal management. Over time, its dashboards, floor analytics, area analytics, and heatmaps became cluttered, inconsistent, and difficult to interpret, reducing admin efficiency. The redesign aimed to deliver a modern experience that would simplify dashboards, streamline setup flows, and provide deeper, actionable insights for enterprise admins.

Challenges

Through stakeholder feedback and usability reviews, key challenges were identified:

• Dashboards cluttered with disconnected widgets and poor data hierarchy.


• Inconsistent data visualizations across Presence, Floor, and Area Analytics.


• Captive Portal setup overwhelming users with too many upfront options.


• Heatmaps static and lacking filters (e.g., dwell time, demographics, device types).


• Overall low usability for admins, leading to slower decision-making.

Design Goals

The redesign set out to achieve the following:

• Simplify dashboards with modular layouts and prioritized KPIs.


• Improve visualization consistency with standardized charts, colors, and labels.


• Streamline captive portal setup into a guided step-by-step flow with live previews.


• Enhance floor and area analytics with real-time drill-downs and clear hierarchy.


• Add interactivity to heatmaps with filters for demographics, devices, and dwell time.


• Boost admin efficiency and productivity through clarity and usability.

My Role

• Conducting stakeholder interviews and competitor analysis (Cisco DNA, Aruba Central).


• Identifying pain points across dashboards, portal setup, and analytics flows.


• Designing low-fi sketches, interactive widget library, and data visualization mappings.


• Creating high-fidelity prototypes in Figma with improved hierarchy and clarity.


• Leading usability testing sessions and iterating based on feedback.


• Delivering the final design package to engineering for implementation.

Discover

Stakeholder Analysis

• Stakeholders confirmed that the dashboards were overwhelming, showing too much data at once without prioritization. Users struggled to focus on what mattered.



• Non-IT users, especially from marketing teams, found the portal creation process rigid and confusing—requiring support even for basic branding tasks.



• Many users were unaware they could create custom dashboards or edit layouts, limiting their ability to adapt the tool to their needs.



• Customer Success flagged recurring tickets for tasks like logo uploads, color changes, and missing preview options—indicating poor onboarding UX.



• Product and network stakeholders emphasized reducing time-to-value by simplifying layout, adding role-based filters, and supporting step-based workflows.

Competitor Analysis

A detailed evaluation of leading location analytics platforms like Cisco Spaces and Aruba Central to understand their strengths, limitations, and design patterns. This helped identify usability gaps and innovation opportunities in visitor tracking, dashboard customization, and captive portal flexibility.

Key insights were distilled from the competitive research, highlighting the usability strengths of Aruba’s clean UI and Cisco’s deep analytics. Despite their capabilities, both platforms lacked role-specific customization and ease-of-use, especially for non-technical teams.

• Aruba Central excels in real-time visibility with clean, minimal dashboards showing connection status, visit frequency, and loyal visitor insights. However, it lacks advanced engagement features or deep behavioral analytics.



• Cisco Spaces offers rich historical analytics, including detailed dwell time, visitor trends, and repeat visitor rates. Its interface supports longer time ranges and comparative views but can be visually dense and overwhelming for new users.



• Aruba’s portal and analytics tools are simple but rigid, offering limited customization and templates primarily aimed at IT users.



• Cisco includes a wider range of engagement and automation features, such as visitor persona tagging and campaign triggers, but requires greater technical knowledge to configure effectively.



• Both platforms show limitations in user onboarding and layout flexibility, especially for cross-functional teams like marketing or guest services that rely on intuitive flows and branded experiences.

HMW Statements

Based on user research and business goals, we framed a set of “How Might We” questions to guide ideation and align the team around solving the right problems. These questions addressed dashboard clarity, role-based workflows, and simplified portal setup.

• How might we simplify dashboards so Admins can quickly identify issues without being overwhelmed by excessive data?



• How might we enable IT Ops teams to configure and monitor networks more efficiently using a unified, role-aware control panel?



• How might we reduce technical dependency for marketing teams when customizing and launching guest Wi-Fi portals?



• How might we improve mobile accessibility for on-the-go users who need real-time visibility across multiple locations?



• How might we allow users from different departments to personalize dashboards and workflows without compromising data accuracy or security?

Develop

Every screen and UX flow was designed with a clear intention—to address the HMW challenges. From modular dashboards to a step-based portal builder, we introduced scalable, intuitive solutions that empower both technical and non-technical users across departments.