IBM Cloud Satellite
(UX Research)
Overview
Role
UX Designer
Challenge
The objective of this evaluative research study was to identify users’ current pain points and opportunities for improvement on satellite storage.
Tools
Keynote
Mural
Webex
Boxnote
Process
Met with key stakeholders and set research plan
Met with our team researcher and lead developer to compile a list of information that would be useful to collect from the users and to establish a research plan. Some examples of this would be: what is your current role? in what context do you use satellite storage? How would use a user interface for this product? We made sure to include information in the research plan that would help us reach our target demographic (internal satellite storage users).
Scheduled interviews with users
Once our research plan was set, we scheduled interviews with users that were confirmed internal satellite storage users that were currently accessing the capabilities through the Command Line Interface (CLI).
Interviewed participants and annotated thoughts and behaviors
During the interviews I took two different roles, interviewer and note-taker. As I was taking notes I was making sure to note behaviors and thoughts the user was thinking (we asked them to think out loud) as they were being asked complete tasks.
Synthesized data and drew conclusions
Once we completed 5 interviews (and concluded that we were finding common themes among the subjects) I took the notes that myself and the team had taken, and affinity mapped the notes. By doing this, I was able to organize the data into categories and compile a list of actionable items that would make storage more intuitive and user friendly.
Presented findings to the team
Once all the data was organized, I put together a presentation and played it back for my team to update everyone on insights and gain collective buy-in to for proposed solutions.
Conclusion
This evaluative case study was one of the first research projects I conducted in the cloud space. Not only was it informative, but I was able to get a fresh prospective on the designs that I had been working on. Some things that i would have done differently, is identified quantifiable data to support our conclusions. An example of this would be timing how long users were taking to complete tasks. Although there were areas of this study that could have been improved to collect more data, I strongly believe that the conclusions we were able to arrive to helped lay foundational knowledge that supported future designs.
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