Master Chorale of South Florida

DataCore: Design Steps/Process


User Experience was a new discipline at DataCore when this effort started but had high-level support. I introduced Scenarios, Information Architecture, Workflows, and Wireframes to DataCore to help determine what problems needed to be solved and get agreement early before screens were designed. Most of these methods were done regularly through sprints and with product managers, UI engineers, and back-end engineers.

Goal-based Information Architecture

After digging deeply into the many tasks and functions in the existing SANsymphony administration application, I proposed organizing information and capabilities based on the jobs Ian needed to get done on a typical day.  This architecture would need to stay relatively stable as features were added so that Ian wouldn’t have to re-learn the interface very much.

Users needed to achieve the following goals:

  1. Is there trouble?  Where?  Let me get on it.

  2. Give new storage to a user or department in my company

  3. Make sure the storage I provide and the data on it is durable and available.  If there is a problem, I can get it back.

  4. Manage and configure the computers running the SANsymphony software.

For business reasons, the new interface would be divided up into DataCore Insights Services (DIS) and the DataCore Web Console (DWC), the latter of which was initially called “MMX” in Figure 1.  The high-level areas of the architecture are:

  1. Dashboard

  2. Analyze

  3. Prepare and Provide Storage

  4. Protect and Recover Data

  5. Manage DataCore Servers

  6. Configuration of the new console itself

Figure 1: Information Architecture

This architecture made its way into the main navigation of the combined DIS/DWC experience. You can learn about what DIS became by viewing the DIS Guided Tour.

Scenarios

For any given sprint work, we built scenarios to address, showing goal, persona, environment, and a story around the scenario. The story would aid in communicating what the persona was getting done.

Figure 2: Scenarios

Workflows

From the scenarios, we generated high-level workflows for how the user would move through information and action to achieve a goal. Each scenario would identify design problems we would need to deal with, places that needed clarifications, and how information connected to other information. The workflows were created using the UXPin prototyping tool.

Figure 3: example workflow