Cloud, data management, security, scale, metadata Hitachi is delivering it all. With cutting edge technology in data management, Hitachi was on a mission to launch it’s new product and I was on board.
Hitachi had hired me in the end of July of 2018 and were getting ready for their product launch in March 2019. The challenge was there was no User Interface for the user to interact with the features of the product.
Team: We have a team of eight backend developers, six quality assurance and one user experience designer developer.
Design: My design responsibility was to understand the product, understand the user requirements, and create a prototype. I had identified the below areas that I will need to work in order to design the product.
- User Personas
- user journey maps,
- brand colour,
- user flows,
- wire frames,
- mockups,
- clickable prototypes
User Personas: I started with meetings with the product manager to understand the product and user requirements. Understood the work that is happening and things that are being developed. I came up with different user personas that would be using the product. one of the examples are below.
Based on the user personas started charting down what the product features will be and how the product will flow. While I was working on the design researched on the best development solution to deliver the product.
Branding: The product is a next generation product which would provide cutting edge data storage. A tool which handles metadata, versions, lifecycles. I chose the colour green to represent the rejuvenation, freshness and technical edge. Looked in the colour contrast ratio while adding the colours.
User Journey Maps: Prepared the user journey maps to design the user flow through the application. It enabled me to explain to the team what the product would function and things it will feature.
While I was going through the user journey I broke down the features into three sections. The startup wizard, the dashboard, the feature pages. What the flow will be and where the user will land based on the choices. The application will have three main sections
- Startup Wizard – This section would have a wizard which would help setup the storage at the backend, certificates etc.
- Dashboard – The dashboard would feature the analytics. It would be bubbled up information from different product items
- Feature Pages – from the dashboard user can access the item page which would enable the user to see different analytics and interact with backend.
The startup Wizard: The start up wizard would have three easy steps to setup the storage component and would lead the user to the dashboard.
The Dashboard: It would have graphs and important information on the page which would give the user a snapshot of all the items.
Feature Pages: The Feature pages for the release were storage component and object storage. These pages will be divided into analytics page and UI interaction. The first half of the section features the graphs for storage component.
Development: I was responsible for setting up the server on Vert.x, deployment, Angular 7 and Angular Material. As the date came closer we had to scope down a lot of features. A MVP was launched with dashboard and storage component page.