BACKGROUND
VMware Capacity Planner is a business analysis, planning and decision support tool used in key phases within a variety of infrastructure assessment projects.
GROWTH
This was the first project I worked on at VMware as an intern. Eventually, I became the lead designer for the project. I worked on this project through four release cycles creating wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, outlineing information architecture, and running heuristic evaluations.
PROBLEM
- There was a large cost to train sales engineers to use Capacity Planner.
- Training costs could be heavily reduced with better information architecture and user experience
HIGHLIGHTS
The project was broken up into 2 major releases. I joined the team when we were making incramental improvements on an existing product. I also lead the design for a 2.0 version of the product.
INCRAMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS
Incremental improvements were made based on running heuristic evaluations on the product. A majority of user experience improvements could be done with a trained eye for design. I became very fimiliar with defending design changes using Nielson's 10 principles for interaction design. We also did multiple customer interviews and prototype walk throughs to evaluate the effectiveness of the design changes.
Seemingly intuative design changes had to be reviewed carefully. In addition to engineering effort on a legacy product. Every change was an expensive change as documentation, programs, and training were impacted.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
I had the opportunity to redesign the entire product. The feature set remained the same, this limited the scope to a navigation, layout and information architecture project. The goal was to create a system that was easy to learn with minimal training. I worked with two offshore development teams in the ideation, implementation, and release phase of this product.
MOCKUPS
I had the opportunity to redesign the entire product. The feature set remained the same, this limited the scope to an information architecture project. The goal was to create a system that was easy to learn with minimal training. I worked with two offshore development teams in the ideation, implementation, and release phase of this product.
RESULT
Investing in the user experience of this project reduced the training cost for this product. The redesigned product was released for external use. Potential customers for VMware could evaluate their infrastructure without the aid of a trained VMWare SE.