UX Transformation & Migration
My Role: Vision, UX/UI Design, Design Guidance, Project Management
The Problem
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Our product, CloudHealth, was designed using old technology and outdated UI, which led to a dated look and feel, clunky workflows, and overloaded navigation with single-cloud views.
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We were migrating to a new platform called “Tanzu Hub” where users did not have a single-pane-of-glass view into managing their public clouds. They had visibility into infrastructure, performance, governance – but nothing related to the cost of their cloud.
As a note, the above are listed as “problems” however I did not actually see a problem at all. Migrating to a new platform was an exciting opportunity to completely transform the state of our user experience. These opportunities don’t come along often, so I knew we had one chance to get this right.
Project Goal
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One unified platform that would contain a basis for displaying the most important cost information for users managing their public cloud – cost reporting, anomaly detection, rightsizing, optimization, and even AI!
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Reimagine the user experience from the ground up. Create enhanced end-to-end workflows that solve problems for our FinOps users in the most intuitive way possible.
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Follow our newly defined set of UX principles - By focusing on key areas such as simplicity, accessibility, and consistency, these principles aim to provide delightful user experience that drives business success.
Research & Discovery Methods
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Competitive Analysis
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Customer Interviews
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Usability Testing
Research Insights
​Customer Survey Results
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34% noted complexity of reporting and managing cloud costs as one of their top 3 barriers to effective cloud management.
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39% noted lack of cloud expertise as one of their top 3 barriers to effective cloud management.
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41% of organizations want to optimize their existing use of cloud (achieve cost savings).
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47% + of organizations currently have a multi-cloud strategy (multiple public and/or private clouds).
Key Takeaway
With this product integration we needed to focus on 3 things - simplicity, multi cloud first approach, and building intuitive flows that achieve cost savings.
Persona
Based on historical data from our CloudHealth platform, we knew our primary persona was FinOps. FinOps is a combination of Finance and DevOps - stressing the communication and collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams. The FinOps persona maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability.
Early Concepts & Explorations
I organized a design workshop where I presented the problem & pains from customers, and we generated fresh ideas as a group. We focused on the goal of simplifying the onboarding experience.
Given that the team was fully remote, I utilized Miro to organize everyone's ideas and our project goals.
Sketches to High-Fidelity Prototype
I quickly sketched an onboarding workflow that aligned with our project goals and received feedback from both the project team and my design team. After that I jumped right into Figma and utilizing our design system, I was able to arrive at a high-fidelity prototype that was ready for user testing.
User Testing & Feedback
I contacted 6 customers that were interested in the tool and willing to give feedback. I drafted a script and asked each customer to walk me through the onboarding setup.
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Overall, customers were excited to get this feature in their hands. However, based on our user testing we identified a few key changes that would improve the experience.
Key Research Insights
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Wizard setup was intuitive, but too lengthy.
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Wireframes for the charts caused a lot of questions. Include dynamic charting visuals in next iteration.
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Users found it cumbersome to edit their settings within a wizard. Limit to a single page form.
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The informational banners caused hesitancy & concern. I changed these to standard tooltips.
Improved Designs
I presented the key take-aways to my team, as well as improved design solutions to reflect the feedback.
Onboarding Page
3 Step Configuration
Try Before You Buy - Dashboard before automation
Measuring Success
A major theme of this project was rapid time to market. At the time of writing this, we have 10 customers in the Beta program for this feature. Based on customer interviews as well as metrics tracked directly from our Savings Automator feature, we were able to determine the following results.
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Customers were able to decrease their overall spend by $40,000/month on average.
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7/10 customers have turned on full automation.
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Over 1,000+ actions have been automatically performed by CloudHealth through Savings Automator.
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6/10 customers have onboarded at least 1 other team member to manage their account's cost savings.
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On average, Cloud Admins are saving approximately 10 hours/week on administrative tasks that are now automated.
Lessons Learned
Communication
This project was completed start to finish on a fully remote team. Being based in Boston and my team in India was a bit of a challenge in terms of time zones and getting quick turnarounds. Shortly after the project started we agreed on an ideal meeting time that worked for everyone and stuck with that time for the remainder of the project.
Gathering & Prioritizing Feedback
We operated as a scrappy agile team and focused on the goal of getting users onboarded quickly. However there were potential improvements for the dashboard experience that were overlooked in order to produce an MVP. We achieved the goal but could have simultaneously gathered feedback for the dashboard. Thankfully these initiatives are now on the backlog!