THE PROBLEM: Managing a lot of data storage systems from the edge to a hybrid cloud is complicated, especially when you can’t monitor them from one place. Multiple racks, multiple locations, and multiple types of storage systems.

THE BACKGROUND: This project started as a fleet management product, allowing the company’s customers to monitor and manage their large-scale storage environments.

As the economy shifted and more businesses wanted the tax advantages of purchasing a service instead of the capital expense of buying hardware, this business worked to roll out its Hardware as a Service (HWaaS) product. Being a service, they needed a way to have customer support users monitor and triage the same problems that the fleet managers would watch for. But to be able to operate with a completely different set of user goals and workflows.

MY ROLE: I worked with engineers, product managers, directors, and volunteer users to build both of these products and their UIs from the ground up. Everything from user research, persona development, workflows, use cases, feature decision-making, wireframing, low and high-fidelity composite iterating, and dashboard information visualization.

What I liked about this project was that we did a full dive into the user research and really took the time to ask a lot of questions. We found several user volunteers and through a collaborative process, we uncovered layer after layer of user goal information that wasn’t immediately clear from our initial research. It was an excellent learning experience!