![[databunker.png]] Project Databunker was a multi-disciplinary initiative that defined the MVP and future experience of a new product offering on IBM Cloud. I was responsible for leading in UI design, UX design, Visual design, and design workshop facilitation. I also assisted with cross-team collaboration, user testing, as well as assisting the Lead designer. `Platform: Web` `Role: User Experience Designer, Visual Designer` `Timeframe: 4 months` `Date: mid-2023` --- # At the start, there was nothing Upon starting, our Cloud portfolio did not have an existing backup and recovery solution for enterprise customers. There were ongoing technical discussions between software engineers and product owners to decide on the MVP and overall market position of the offering. During the early technical discussions, myself and a UX Architect identified an opportunity to collaborate with our stakeholders to **create a north star vision that we would define and align on the product and experience roadmaps.** #### Goal definition We participated in opening discussions with our senior stakeholders to understand the goals of the offering. From there, our design squad defined our work moving forward. 1. **Discover** Customers need to be able to find the applicable solution that meets their companies' needs. 2. **Manage and monitor** Users need to monitor the health of their systems, adjust based on changing requirements, and be notified in the event of unforeseen outages or disasters to act on. 3. **Configuration** Support the vast complexity of enterprise customer workloads with a comprehensive provisioning experience. 4. **Scalability** As the offering grows over the next few years, more capabilities and features will need to integrate with the offering and work seamlessly for supported workload configurations. Once we had the overarching goals for our design team, we began to explore the journeys and mindsets the users and businesses may have of the. Working closely with our internal subject matter experts (SMEs), we crafted personas that would be used to define their journeys, mindsets, and goals. ![[databunker-buyer-persona.png]] ![[databunker-user-persona.png]] # Competitor experience review We performed a competitive analysis to understand how Azure, GCP, AWS and other key players not only guide customers, but how their offerings cater to businesses in highly regulated industries. We focused on a few key areas to maintain consistency in our findings: 1. Initial setup 2. Dashboard views 3. Policy configuration 4. Recovery and restore experience ![[typical-journey.png]] #### Competitive analysis takeaways: ✔️ **Pros:** - Most of the competitors experiences included a central "hub" where all backup capabilities lived on their service. ❌ **Cons:** - Competitors lack certain features that are critical to customers in highly regulated industries, leaving a gap for IBM to fulfill which supports IBM Cloud's primary market strategy. - Dashboards were very light on information, where they only show overall numbers for backup/restore jobs with completions, failures, and in-progress. **Overall:** - Utilize a model of pre-made templates for backup rules and reports. - Dashboards should provide clear visuals of resources being protected and depict the customer's whole backup architecture - Linking out to or incorporating supporting services is key to a seamless experience. - Accessible/in-context documentation can provide details on backup concepts and best practices for all users. # Big Ideas workshop I led an initiative to facilitate a design thinking workshop with key stakeholders and SMEs to identify Big ideas that can be used to influence product decisions at all stages of the product roadmap. ![[big-ideas-scope.png]] To maximize the usage of time, we outlined a few key questions to focus the group's thinking. ![[big-ideas.png]] **A few key ideas from the workshop:** - Utilize templates and project-based deployable architectures to serve as a starting place for customers - Documentation should be easily accessible and referenced throughout the product experience to allow both advanced and non-technical users to navigate the experience. - Assist customers in crafting their backup strategies using visual design and interative elements to guide them towards a solution. Overall, the ideas we gathered during the workshop would be used to ideate on possible experiences we would need to verify with product stakeholders and users. # UI explorations With the insights from the competitive analysis and Big Ideas workshop, I was able to generate wireframes that explore aspects of the future north star experience. ![[crazy-eights.png]] With my extended design team, we brainstormed UI ideas through a [Crazy Eights exercise](https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/methodology/phase3-sketch/crazy-8s) to help me further flesh out ideas at higher fidelities. ![[big-ideas-explorations-1.png]] ![[big-ideas-explorations-2.png]] *Click to view larger image.* # User testing IBM runs an annual TechXchange conference where IBM representatives meet with IBM Cloud users to gain firsthand feedback and demo our products. This happened to line up perfectly with the Databunker design process, so the team put together an unmoderated user testing plan to gain feedback. **The results:** We were able to have 8 users demo a clickable Figma prototype of the creation experience to understand how well backup administrators could configure their backup policies to fit their workload's needs. Overall, there were some key takeaways: 1. Participants thought that the tagging concept to identify target resources was unfamiliar and confusing 2. Participants were confused as to how the policy would be enacted once they hit submit 3. Some participants expressed a desire to run a backup immediately upon creation 4. Participants felt the overall UI design was intuitive and information was not overly complex. The user testing strengthened our creation process and allowed us to implement real user feedback into the proposed design. # Crafting the ideal experience With a user test completed, I was able to rapidly implement user feedback to later share with technical leaders and engineers on the project. I was able to gain rapid feedback from both designers and SMEs to further refine the ideas. In addition, I had the opportunity to push the limits of an experimental design language which would influence the future UI design of IBM Cloud. ![[hi-fi-dashboard.png]] ![[backup-policy.png]] Our technical stakeholders felt that we succeeded in bridging the communication gap between technical details and UX design succinctly and were excited to see how users perceived the prototype. From this point, technical discussions began to happen more frequently, and I was able to partake in those discussions with the provided designs to help drive the future of databunker. # Design vision With the knowledge we gained throughout our various design exercises on the project, we acquired a set of guiding insights for each pillar of the experience to help guide the future feature set and overall user experience: **Discover** - There are multiple ways customers can configure their backups, and not every customer will have the same workload configuration as another. - It is important for IBM Cloud to point customers in the right direction in order to acquire and use the correct backup solution that meets their needs. **Manage and monitor** - Customers need to be notified if a disaster strikes at a moments notice. - Having options to automate the backup and recovery process can reduce the amount of need for human intervention. - A single pane of glass experience will give users the ability to manage multiple workload types in a single location, reducing the potential headache of needing to look in a separate area of the product portfolio to perform backups. **Configuration** - Customers will have a wide set of requirements, and may not require the same backup parameters as others. - Customers need to be able to meet stringent compliance and reporting standards, making it critical that the end solution meets and exceeds the more niche technical requirements. **Scalability** - The offering will need to accommodate more features and workload coverage over time. # Outcomes As a result of this end-to-end design exercise, the stakeholder team was able to put forward a product roadmap that aligned our UX vision with technical feasibility and strategic business objectives. The team could now move into creating the foundations of a centralized, single-pane-of-glass experience for both infrastructure and application-level backups with a new MVP offering: **IBM Cloud [[Backup and Recovery]]**. --- #### Any Questions? Thanks for making it all the way through this project! If you have any questions please **feel free to reach out to me at** [email protected] Get back to my homepage: [[Home]] Or view my other professional project: [[Backup and Recovery]]