UX Design Consultant | 2016-2017
Contract RemoteRackspace | Migration Manager
SaaS B2B B2c EnterpriseAs the cost of data storage goes down, Rackspace was finding a lot of their customers choosing to move their accounts to other providers. Rackspace found that many of those data storage providers did not provide adequate support if any. So, in order to retain business, Rackspace saw an opportunity to offer what they do best, provide "Fanatical Support". I was brought in as a consultant to be part of an agile and efficient crack team consisting of a Product Manager, myself, and two developers. We were to design and build a proof of concept that would allow customers and non-customers to easily migrate their data to other storage providers like Amazon Web Service and Google Cloud Storage.
Rackspace needed quick design prototypes for a data migration management tool that would be used by Customers, Rackspace support (Rackers), and non-customers. So, there would need to be three versions to serve each persona. The company was also on the cusp of introducing a new design system, so our product needed to reflect the old and begin to introduce new styles.
When I joined the team, there had already been some wireframes drawn up and a rough prototype in place. I had spent some time with the in-house UX team to get oriented with their design system. I had learned that they were working on a re-brand, and was needing to integrate it with the future system. After evaluating the existing prototype, I gained access to the front-end framework they were currently using and started to add a blended version with some new design components and styles from the future brand guidelines.
This particular welcome screen aims at potential customers allowing them to choose to use the migration tool to help them migrate resources from any storage provider to any destination.
After choosing an account to migrate and a destination to migrate to, a user would choose which resources they would like to migrate and the resource statuses.
Based on items chosen we created a system to show how much a specific migration would cost per month, and also suggest other ways to reconfigure that may cost less. This would be the opportunity for users to get further Racker support if desired.
The final step shows a breakdown of what users chose to migrate, projected cost, and an option to schedule when to initiate the migration to the desired destination. We aimed to make a simple display of all the choices made up until this point to make it plain to the user what they are about to do before launching the migration.
The dashboard is the end point for the migration process. This is where a customer can see all migrations in process and their statuses, tickets, alerts, and start a new migration.
This view is only available to the 'Rackers" support specialist. This gives them insights about migration durations, statuses, and customer activity. We found that most Rackers were wanting to have an easily accessible place to view these insights so we included it within the workflow.
Rackspace was a fun project, and I enjoyed working with a small team. We had a good system that allowed us to iterate quickly and get to an MVP faster. The prototype received a lot of praise, and the users we tested it on had very positive feedback.
