Project background
I was tasked to design the interface for vFabric Application Director. As developers started working in virtualized environments. A product was needed to orchestrate the configuration of each layers of an application, deployment, and managing updates.
The project was to flesh out the user experience. It was one of my favorite projects at VMware as I was able to bring clearity to ambiguity and had a chance to show my strength in the ideation phase of a design process.
There were two additional designers assigned to this project. I lead our team through complete design cycle.
Methodologies and practices
Wireframes design, high-fidelity mockups, information archetecture, design system, affinity diagram
Problem
- Developers did not have a developement environment to configure and deploy vertual applications
- The UI strategy for the product was undefined
- The information archetecture for the product was undefined
Process
This was a large project in terms of feature set. A majority of the time was spent on defining the information archetecture and user flow. Light user testing was done but more extensive user testing was needed for better quality user feedback.
Defining the Interface
The engineering director created a prototype of the system. However, it was comandline based. There were over 1000 features that needed to be organized into a user interface. I worked with the engineering team to understand all the features. In hindsight, it is easy to see this product as an IDE. It took 3 weeks to understand the complete feature set and arrive at that conclusion.
White boarding sessions
I walked the engineering team through card sorting exersize to organize the feature set. We concluded that there six main views for the application: Projects, Catalog, Actions, Content, Runs, and Schedule. We designed the details for each view and created a storyboard on how the end user will configure and run each project.
Mockups
Result
My job was to help the team through the ideation phase of the product. I Wireframed the entire product and defended my design to the executive team along with the director and lead engineer I was working with. I was moved to another project when it was funded and VMware hired a design consultant to work with the engineering team through the development process.