vSphere is VMware's flagship product platform and is an industry standard for armies or IT professionals that manage data-centers. I joined the team at VMware to contribute to efforts of porting their legacy flash/flex web client over into a modern html/js web client.
As lead designer, I joined as the first design engagement on the project. Partnering with Pivotal Labs, we leveraged user-centered design and lean UX principles to discover what features customers needed most in order for them to to start using the new web client. This greatly helped our team prioritize features and flows.
During this effort we also validated areas of the product experience that were so bad, a complete redesign was in order.
The three dimensions we used to drive towards that goal were: reliability - it always works and it solves my needs, performance - it feels faster and I trust the data I see, and simplicity - it feels intuitive and familiar, and I only see what I need to see.
One area in vSphere that we suspected a need for improvement was Roles & Permissions. We quickly validated this with users and found that many admins had moved on towards automation solutions due to the risks of errors involved with people manually using the UI. The current UI was incredibly complex involving dialogs on top of dialogs trying to solve for every use-case. Through our conversations with users, we discovered a few really simple use cases that were the predominant reasons people might find a simple UI useful to come back to.
We set out to greatly simplify the experience and test some light weight ideas.. By doing this we hoped to ship some value to our customers faster while also learning. In the end we landed on a simple dialog with only a couple canonical drop downs and a search with type-ahead auto-complete. This MVP was largely built in a single sprint and stands today as one of the most extreme examples of transitioning the experience from a severely complex one to a very simple solution that handles the users required use-cases.
