Shrita Ray manages datacenter operations for Pepsi. She has a lot on her plate, from keeping the servers up-and-running to keeping her stakeholders happy and informed. The last thing she needs is her tools to annoy her while she’s trying to work. Read More

Unfortunately, according to user feedback, she is annoyed, reporting that VMware notifications are frustrating or — even worse — irrelevant: “We ignore 99% of alarms within VMware. Most are not accurate or, if they are, aren’t actionable.”

VMware’s business model is built upon an array of business units, each targeting their own market segment. No incentive for a unified approach to notifications existed across products, so each team was implementing different patterns. As a platform design lead, consistency in notifications across these products was key to insuring a good user experience.

While there were structural business challenges that made my team's goals towards consistency difficult to accomplish, I saw opportunities for platform-level design solutions. I collaborated to understand more about the challenges product teams faced, then worked to define designs that solved user and business pain points through a design process driven by user research.

Notifications is the key pain point when monitoring infrastructure, and that market is on track to double through 2024 to $36 billion dollars (Persistent Market Research, 2018). VMware is not a player in that market at the moment, only having been able to capture 6% of the current market pie (IDC, 2016). A big part of VMware's lack of ability to get market share — according to user interviews I conducted — was the poor user experience.

I collaborated with the product management to define and present the business case for creating a better, more usable notifications system. If VMware could look to work into that market space, we could sell other, more sophisticated VMware-developed monitoring notifications software as add-ons.

Bill Rothdale is the Director of IT for Ford Motors. In his role, he needs to make sure that his team stays efficient and that the department’s bills get paid and its budget is on track. He’s had a hard time migrating to VMware’s new cloud billing ... Read More

He reports that it is difficult to understand, its details confusing: "I don’t want to offend anyone who is working on it, but … your billing is crap!"

As VMware's cloud presence grew, it had become apparent that the existing Billing features weren't cutting the mustard, as our IT Director Bill pointed out before. However, we were also lagging behind in some key feature areas: projecting, budgeting, and alerting.

While I did design these features, I also helped our product team realize that our competitors' products missed some key design considerations. Let me show you those, then how we solved for them.

The two industry leaders in the cloud marketplace are AWS and Azure. I looked at their solutions in the "Define" phase of my design process in a competitive analysis.

On the one hand, AWS has done a good job of creating robust data visualizations where users can dive into the granular details of their charges. On the other hand, Azure is strong in managing multiple budgets and projections where users can track their spending against different budgets. Neither, however, had done a great job of synthesizing the views or providing progressive disclosure.

Billy is a member of the design team that I lead. He's got great energy, a good design sense, but not a ton of experience yet. Read on to discover how we worked together to drive alignment and deliver product feedback across VMware... Read More

I'd like to start with the organizational context. Vmware collects product feedback across products to gauge UX across the suite. The story begins with internal stakeholders being unhappy with the existing product feedback. You can see why below, it's interruptive which is very problematic when viewed in the complexity of VMware products. From the design side, we weren't really happy with it either.

Billy and I had never worked together, so I wanted to let him define how to move the project forward. Before I knew it, he was off and running. At a later 1:1 meeting, Billy shared that he was feeling down about the project: he was having trouble getting buy-in from stakeholders for his solution.

You see, Billy — through his research and collaboration — had come up with a design that broke with the way VMware had collected feedback prior. Billy's research had revealed that users are more likely to provide feedback when they are presented few options and emotion-based scales, whereas VMware has used 7 point numbered scales prior.

After hearing Billy's difficulty gaining alignment, I worked with the concerned stakeholder — the Director of Customer Satisfaction — to understand his needs and motivations. In his role, he needed to create benchmarks to compare VMware's product satisfaction across the portfolio and against their own performance historically. That way, he could help the organization figure out which products were most well liked. The 7 point numerical satisfaction scale was critical to his ability to give a historical view of product satisfaction.

When I met with him, I dug in to understand more of our company goals. If Billy the designer was right, then updating to a 5 point emotion-based scale would get more engagement than a 7 point numerical scale. Wouldn't getting more users to fill out the feedback forms benefit VMware by giving it a stronger data set?

He agreed, then we worked to define an A/B test to compare the two versions. If we received more engagement in the emotion-based scale, we could then make the case that switching to that model is better for VMware.