Prior to their acquisition by Oracle, Nimbula was an “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) company that provided the tools for other companies to create and manage their own cloud services. They were faced with an intricate problem: how could they make their product intuitive enough for normal developers and cloud service end users without concealing its technical prowess? To solve this challenge, EchoUser conducted an end-to-end product redesign, from user research, to wireframes and testing, to pixel perfect mockups.
Approach
Our biggest challenge was this: normal people don’t “speak API.” As such, the existing UI — essentially an API with a skin — needed to be redesigned and re-architected. User research activities and a comprehensive iterative design process led to a product designed to deliver powerful IaaS functionality in a user-friendly package.
First, we conducted over 12 user interviews and workshops to delve into user behavior and identify key user flows. We then translated our findings into a new product experience. A home screen provided much-needed context to novice and expert users of the complex app. We also provided complex JSON files with a visual face to help more novice users manage intricate cloud operations.
Impact
At the end of the engagement, we delivered comprehensive research findings, as well as detailed wireframes and visual mockups that communicated how the redesigned product should look and function — and within a year, Nimbula was acquired by cloud computing giant Oracle.
