Ultimaker Subscriptions

Ultimaker, the global leader in desktop 3D printing, has launched the enterprise suite of software tools that enable professional organizations to scale up the 3D printing usage across their businesses.

Back in 2020, my team and I developed what started as an MVP Early Access program into a fully-featured subscription offering that was rapidilly serving thousands of enterprise customers worldwide. Ultimaker Subscription is ultimately the pioneer Ultimaker's recurring revenue program that sells software, service and learning bundles in its ecosystem. subscription.ultimaker.com

The Challenge

Our challenge was to create and develop a platform that allowed businesses to redeem, purchase and manage subscriptions throughout a tiered-based access to fully leverage products like Ultimaker Digital Factory, Ultimaker Academy and Ultimaker Support.

We built a Subscription Portal that gives the users access to a large set of benefits that enhance their 3D printing needs such as remote printer management, expert support, verified plugins for in-house software like Cura, e-learning 3D printing courses, invite co-workers to use the subscription, among other features.

Defining & iterating the MVP

The entire platform offers 4 Subscription tiers: Ultimaker Personal, which is the free offering and the following 3 paid subscriptions: Essentials, Professional and the most customized one, Excellence. All of them tailored to each target whether it being a startup or an international enterprise.

First and foremost, we were very agile driven iterating during development to not harm the scope, but also adding value to this future-proof product that we were building. So we were from the bare minimum to a sturdy self independent platform.

After gathering inputs from stakeholders, we identify the following key needs and features this product needded to start using the Subscriptions:

Goal definition: Enabling customers who have subscribed to access the variety of benefits that Ultimaker logged in area offers, allowing them to take advantage of its features.

Enterprise software and E-learning: The possibility to download the Ultimaker Cura Enterprise and the ability to get weekly live demos and learn about the many Ultimaker products.

Upgrade and Downgrade: Automated subscriptions upgrade or downgrade with integrated payment processing.

Billing details: Integraded payment tool allowing customers to not only add their billing details, but download invoices and track their payment history. This feature came shortly after we went live and it was extremely valuable.

Support: Customers can open tickes through support link inside the subscription page.

I used Miro and FigJam to do the flows, costumer journeys, brainstorms, card-sorting and wireframes. Here are some boards I did to help us visualize and identify pain points in the Subscription Portal:

flow
flow
flow

Working with developers

I worked closely with 2 developers (one Front-end and one Backend) and 1 Product Owner to develop the designs for the Subscription Portal. We were a very lean team with a big task to deliver, so I decided to create a simple and direct design approach to not harm the front-end processes. I also used Ultimaker design system components to quicken the implementation process and avoid harming the scope.

Together with the team, I structured my workflow into a few steps that gave us a better overview of the wireframes and prototypes I had to create. The main tasks I divided as follows:

challenge

1. Define the challenge

ideate

2. Ideate possible scenarios and journeys

testing

3. Test with developers

review

4. Review with the team and stakeholders

refine

5. Refine with the team

Prototypes

I love making prototypes, not only they save us endless time but also they give everyone - myself inclueded - a good perception on which path we should take. Apart from that, I have loads of fun making them. 🤗

I also think they are valuable for showing our designs and technical processes to make stakeholders understand the whole task.

The following prototypes are good examples of the overall Subscription pages, the upgrade steps with the tiered-base options using payment details and the billing details:

dashboard
tier
upgrade

My role

UX/UI Designer and Prototypes
I created the entire end-to-end flows from onboarding to upgrading and canceling the subscription service. I was constantly testing with developers, prototyping, card-sorting, swapping and changing my designs to deliver a suitable product on time.

I used Miro and FigJam mostly to build wireframes, and Figma for the visuals and prototypes.

I made sure that the designs followed Ultimaker guidelines but I also took the opportunity to tinker small design components that would make more sense for the Subscription purposes.

dashboard-screens onboarding-screens

Results and takeaways

Working in a small scrum team having a huge task ahead of us was an extremely steep learning curve. We were, against all odds, able to deliver our work within the scope.

Some key lessons from this were:

Focus on building the MVP first: Aside from our daily work with other Ultimaker products, we still had to create and implement a functional product. So it's crucial to focus on the features that deliver the highest value to the customers.

Changing the Waterfall mindset: I was the only designer in the team and we didn't have enough people to fine-tune or worry about every design detail, and therefore I had to lower my expectations as a designer and try to remember the many iterations to come.

The best experience comes from collaboration: Back in 2020, we were forced to work completely from home for the first time, and that also forced us to work with many different collaborative tools, increasing our ability to collaborate across teams. And I've seen that happening not only within our team, but inside the entire company.

More of my work:

mockup-desk mockup-desk