Various design projects at Veritas
Role At Veritas, I manage a team of 6 designers. Most of them are fairly junior, so that gives me the opportunity to get involved hands-on.
Design direction: I work closely with them to review designs, give design feedback, brainstorm designs, etc.
Process direction: I lay out process and best practices, help them figure out which design methodology/practice/process is appropriate to solve the given problem.
Project direction: I give guidance on how best to collaborate/influence/negotiate with stakeholders, help them plan out projects and timelines.
Empower: I remove obstacles in the designer’s path, handle escalations and get involved in tricky design conversations with stakeholders as needed
Infoscale
My Role: Design Lead to 2 designers
Rebuild two different legacy High Availability products from the ground up and consolidate into one. Simplify complex side nav and complex flows for various features.
Process
Validate personas
Organize information
Create Object model
Created flowcharts for approximately 100 flows
Created wireframes for approximately 100 flows
Research along the way to validate
Step 1: Validated Personas
Step 2: Organized information (rough site map)
Step 3: Created Object Model
Step 4: Flowcharts helped reveal and solve complexities
Step 5: Flowcharts helped reveal and solve complexities
Before and After
Before - Complex Side Nav
After - Simplified Left Nav by determining heirarchy amongst various objects and moving relevant hierarchy out of the left nav and into the rest of the product
After - Simplified Left Nav by using view switcher
Before - Confusing info presentation
After - Information is clearly organized into sections and appropriate components are used for various kinds of info display (tables versus form fields versus icons, etc.). Progressive disclosure used (in other screens) to clean up clutter
Before - Readability issues. No drilldown functionality so object hierarchy unclear to user. User has to access multiple topology diagrams from various parts of product. Object actions unclear
After - Reduced clutter. Drilldown functionality conveys clear object heirarchy. Consolidated topology access.
After - Clear access to object actions. Progressive disclosure reduces clutter.
Before - Modal upon Modal issues
After - Studied user flows, validated, created logical sequential step wizards to organize information and tasks
APTARE
My Role: Design Lead to 2 designers
APTARE is a data visualization tool that was bought by Veritas. It is a very mature app with a lot of features. We wanted to make it look like a part of the Veritas family, by leveraging the Veritas Design Language (VDL) code components (side nav, buttons, form elements, etc.). But since this would be a product-wide update and due to technology differences, this was a daunting task for Engineering and would take 2-3 years. So we worked with them to change the styles in their application to make it look like it was using VDL, without actually using VDL code components. The product also had significant usability problems. While we could not address them all in one go, we had to figure out a way to improve usability on existing features as much as possible along the way.
Process
Heuristic Evaluation - Even though we were asked to just change the styles and limited usability improvements, it was important for us to do this, get a lay of the land and figure out what we were working with.
Visual Design and usability improvements that fit within the Engineering timeline (reorganize information, clean up clutter, etc.)
System design - for each component (example: title bar), did inventory of the various implementations/inconsistencies of that component, analyzed patterns and proposed recommendations
Due to Engineering bandwidth, they could not work on design updates to all the components through product. Strategized how to best break up design improvements over several phases, with minimal disruption to the user
By working closely with Engineering and Product Management and talking through our process, etc. we were able to win their trust. They asked us to redesign some new product features that they were working on.
Before
After
Due to limited Engineering bandwidth, all design updates could not be accommodated in a single release. Created phased approach to release chunks at a time with least disruption to user
IxD improvements - Old UI had navigation inconsistencies
IxD improvements - cleaned up Left Nav
IxD improvements - Old UI had title inconsistencies
Ixd improvements - cleaned up inconsistencies
IxD improvments - old UI had data table inconsistencies
Detailed guidelines and recommendations for charts and graphs
New feature work - By working closely with Engineering and Product Management and talking through our process, etc. we were able to win their trust. They asked us to redesign some new product features that they were working on.
NetBackup (NBU)
My Role: Design Lead to 7 designers
NetBackup is Veritas’ flagship data protection product. My team has designed various flows here - some are brand new features to be designed from the ground up, some are feature enhancements. They have designed flows around protection and recovery of various workloads (VMware, SQL, Cloud, etc.), storage, role based access control (RBAC) etc.
Here is a journey of the RBAC redesign project. The old RBAC system was extremely complicated, requiring the user to jump around various parts of the product and execute tasks in a certain order (with no in-product guidance). We designed a new, streamlined, simple experience for the user. The designers had options in the beginning leveraging NBU wizard patterns. But it seemed complicated for the user. I encouraged the designers to take a step back from existing processes, really examine the use flow / tasks / flowcharts and determine what would be better. The final design used a hub and spoke model which was a significantly simplified user experience.
Old model
Earlier options - still a lot of info clutter. 3 step screener leads user to different 5 step wizards. This is frustrating for the user.
Earlier options - Lots of sub-steps within each step
Earlier options - Using tabs instead of accordions but still a lot of info and actions within actions
Final option - Hub and spoke model. User launches various steps from a single hub, finish their steps and are brought back to the hub which tells them what they have done so far, what they have do next and how much is remaining in the overall process
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