Komprise Replications
Designing the monitoring experience
When
October - December 2020
Responsibilities
UX design, UI design, Task flows, Protoyping
Collaborators
CEO, Product Manager, FE engineers, BE engineers
Better monitoring, easier management
In response to a partner's request, Komprise undertook the development of an asynchronous replication tool that would allow IT professionals to safeguard company data by replicating it to an alternative location. To secure the deal, we committed to delivering a seamless end-to-end experience that would align with the launch of their new products.
My contribution
As the lead designer, I took charge of defining and designing the Replications experience in close collaboration with the lead product manager and engineering team. A significant aspect of my role involved prioritizing the design of the monitoring table on the main page, a critical feature within the product.
Scope and constraints
Komprise needed to release the beta by the end of 2020, which left us 2 months to design, build, and conduct QA testing. The timeline was more aggressive than our normal one and left little room for user research, ideation, and iteration.
I strategically prioritized defining the core screens and workflows of the Replications platform, while leveraging existing design components to streamline front-end work.
User insights
Due to their familiarity with our customers and technical understanding of the product requirements, I first met with the Product Manager and CEO to get better insights into our users. Because we didn't have time to conduct user research, I relied on them heavily to define the user needs that would guide this process. Through our discussion we concluded that users needed:
- Easily monitor which tasks weren't completing successfully and breaching SLA's
- Identify and find their replication tasks when creating a high volume of tasks
Defining
Once I had a better idea of our user goals and needs, I worked with the PM to lay out the framework for the new product. We made a rough sitemap of the screens to serve as a design and prioritization guide. I outlined the basic components, while relying on the PM to fill in the technical details.
Diving into high-fidelity
I would normally begin with lower fidelity wireframes, but here I recognized that I needed to start with high fidelity designs and accurate mock data. This was to get an instant, actionable feedback from my product team and get accurate technical feedback from our FE and BE teams on what would be feasible to build within our limited timeframe. Using existing design system components, I tried to keep in mind:
What information was important to for the user to be alerted to visually?
Integrating feedback
After presenting these initial designs to stakeholders, I received feedback that users had difficulty pinpointing useful metrics and understanding which tasks had successful backup copies.
After meeting with stakeholders, I realized that we had missed these key user insights in our earlier meetings:
- Users needed reassurance that backups were running successfully without having to dig deeper
- Users wanted the ability to quickly locate their backups for disaster recovery
Updates
I revisited the new screen, aiming to reduce the amount of text in the table by including insights that told users directly what they wanted to know instead of leaving users to connect their own dots.
Outcomes
Once this first iteration of the monitoring table was completed, I quickly moved onto designing the other features of this product at a similar breakneck speed. The main page underwent 2 more minor iterations through work with the front end, back end, and QA teams before the beta was released on Dec 5th. Through our combined efforts in a period of 2 months, Komprise was able to land and secure a $4 million deal with our partner and greatly increase our customer base.
Future plans for this feature included adapting this design to fit a wider range of data types. While we received positive feedback from initial customers, my plan was to eventually run usability tests on these screens to better understand how users interact with the table to monitor their replication tasks and access their backup copies.
