Hi all,

I've been working on revamping our Bill of IT project and have come up with a new look home page design and some features to help users get the most out of Apptio.

But it got me thinking - what have other organisations done to improve their user experience?

Below is a screenshot of our new Bill of IT Home Page. Some of the new features include:

• Multi currency
• Quick date change buttons 
• Help button which goes to a dedicated reference guide 
• Links to other Apptio modules (ours are not all on the same environment) and other internal resources
• Announcements section for new/changed/deleted services and reporting enhancements etc
• Consolidated reports
  • Our Technology Expenses were previously spread across 15 separate reports (Projects + Services + Applications - each with a Summary and Detailed report and then some intermediary reports too) each with their own set of views and slicers which users had to select every time. We've now brought these all together in a single report.

If you have any more ideas to help with a better user experience, please add your thoughts below.

Hi @Mark Salib,

I am in awe of what you have done here and to be perfectly honest, i did not know we could even do that. Curious to understand how you have done this.

Regards

Suresh

Hi @Suresh Sawlani,

Thank you for your feedback

Most of the features shown on our home page are achieved through the use of buttons - there's an article on how to use these here. The "Button Text" setting in the properties can be set to show images and format text similar to a HTML component. The icons can be found in this location: http:// {your apptio URL} /graphics/IconExperience/search.html.

As an example, here's the button text for our Technology Expenses report (top left button):

<p style='font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;text-align:center;line-height:30%'><img src='https://acme.apptio.com/graphics/IconExperience/v_collections_png/business_finance_data/48x48/shadow/chart_area.png'><br><br>Technology Expenses</p><br><br><br> <b><p style=text-align:left>View overall business expenses relating to Technology including Recoveries from COG Tech Services & Investments as well as Direct Expenses incurred by the business. </b><br><br> Views available: <br> - trends of actual spend over the past 7yrs<br> -  detailed information with user / asset granularity<br> - variances to plan<br> - full year projections<br><br></p>

Hope this helps but let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,

Mark

Hi @Mark Salib

Very Nice! I'm Interested on the help button, - how does it work?  is it a HTML component which hyperlinks to something on a SharePoint/external site? if not how have you put the help resource into Apptio?

Regards

Will.S

Hi @Will Simpson,

Thanks for your feedback

Yes, the help button is a HTML component which hyperlinks to an external site. We use Confluence as an online document management tool and, in here, we have a dedicated Quick Reference Guide (QRG) for every report in Apptio as well as information on how to use Apptio for new users e.g. video guides, tips & tricks, glossary, contact points etc.

The QRGs have screenshots of the actual Apptio report as well as information on where the data comes from, what it means, what questions can it answer, where users can get more information etc. It takes a bit of time to write up the content, but the idea is that users can self-serve their questions on how to interpret the data in Apptio, and then the TBMO can spend more time on value-add tasks rather than answering the simple questions.

I have considered having these help documents within Apptio by creating a report with HTML components which the help button can point to, but I'm not yet convinced that it's worth going down this path in our situation. 

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Mark

First of all...dang!

I am really impressed at how beautiful the dashboard looks.  Super easy navigation makes it even more appealing, and trust me, users need easy navigation with less clicks to get their answers.

Secondly...

I am saddened by the fact that there could be so many users that may not know that this functionality even exists within the Apptio toolkit.  Need to figure out if we need to raise awareness via some Cookbook Recipes to help concoct delicious looking dishes like this one.

haha thanks @Bill Baroniunas . You should have seen our old Bill of IT - over 20 buttons on the home page with no context or appeal. Users give up pretty quickly when they don't know where to go!

Also, completely agree on awareness point!! That's why I started this discussion - surely other organisations have great ideas which we can all benefit from.. 

@Mark Salib, I agree with your approach to switch from your old home page.

Very impressive, @Mark Salib. Our team created a similar 'splash page', but not as elaborate as yours.

Check this out, @Devon Bilsing, @Ben Foster, @Erik Brown.

Thanks @Tony Wong! Feel free to share yours as well  Might help spin up some ideas!

@Mark Salib, we basically modify the OOTB 'Home' page (from the Cost Transparency Reference project) as our 'splash page' and added links.

@Mark Salib, can you tell us how your company utilizes Bill of IT and the associated benefits you've come to discover?  Thanks much! +@Sarah Meldrum

@Mark Salib - and AWESOME 'home page' - love it!! 

Thanks for the feedback @Jenny Franklin

As for the Bill of IT discussion, I've replied on your post. Let me know if you have any questions on this or need any more detail.

Thanks, @Jenny Franklin!  I'm all over this.

I like the structure very much, not "only" the Apptio side of it, but also the organizational embedding on the right hand side

Did you incorporate linking from Apptio reports to "external" tools like ServiceNow or other infrastructure management tools (where some golden source data comes from)? 

Thanks for the feedback @Ulrich Basler

We get all the detail into Apptio from the various external sources so that users don't need to go to multiple systems to find the answers they need.. So, the link is into Apptio, not out of Apptio...

@Mark Salib  That is a crazy good looking home page.  Nicely done !

Thanks @George McElfresh

That is such a great home page!  Clear, understandable, and user friendly.  

Thanks @Sarah Meldrum

Thank you for sharing, Mark.  I really like your page design! 

Since this has been in place since November (when you posted this), have you experienced any issues with it after Apptio upgrades or are there any other issues you've experienced with the custom landing page that you'd like to share?   

The reason I ask is because we are considering implementing something similar but were worried about upgrades.  Any advice or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you !

Thanks for the feedback @Julie Whitehurst

As for issues with upgrades - we've gone through quite a few in our time without any issue. Our Bill of IT implementation is completely custom so we're not using any OOTB features at all; Tables / transforms / metrics / models / reports - all built from scratch. In our CT project, we started with the OOTB functionality and have customised around it, and similarly, no issues with upgrades. Our CT project is now >95% custom. 

The advice we received from Apptio around this was to create and edit copies of the OOTB reports rather than edit the OOTB reports themselves so that when upgrades happen, you can see what changes were made to the OOTB version in case you want to adopt these in the customised report and there's no risk of interference. Just remember to deactivate the original reports so they're not included as part of the calculation time.

Other than that, my advice is always to consider your customers first - what works best for them from a user experience point of view. If navigation is not clear and/or they need to click through to multiple reports/tabs/drills to find the information they need, based on our observations, they will give up quickly. Hence we've gone the completely custom route and we've seen our usage stats significantly increase as a result which is great.

We have a lot of custom reports as well.  When we know we are doing major upgrades, especially content upgrades, we always make a copy / create a branch, so we know what we had before the upgrade occurs.  This is awesome work!

@Mark Salib ... brilliantly designed!

Thanks @Jaitabh Jewel Sharma

This is a great design! Thanks so much for sharing. 

This is awesome !! I'm going to steal some of your ideas @marksalib !   I really like the announcements at the bottom and the links to the side!   

Here's ours, modified a long time ago, but it's so 'plain' … We 'fumbled' our way through HTML when we started ours and each button below has hover text associated with them as well.  The 'What is TBM?" button is a popup that describes what TBM is.  That would be useful in the 'Help & Support' section that you created.   The link at the bottom can be used to contact the TBM team via a direct email.  We tried to stay within our company's branded color scheme as well without too many colors. 

Thanks for the feedback @Kathy Ferry! Happy to have provided some inspiration