5 months Remote Full-time Design Internship

Redesign a software upgrade experience

UCD design process case study

Project brief

OneFS is a parallel distributed networked file system and the operation basis of Dell’s millions dollar unstructured storage platform — Isilon.
Most of Isilon’s clients have large scale and critical production environment, which adds another layer of concerns of data unavailable/data lost during a major upgrade. My project was set out to reimagine and redesign the whole upgrade experience on OneFS, in which I also introduced the “one-click-upgrade“ concept to the product team.

Sneak Peek

User pain points

Before an upgrade

Too many steps just to get the upgrade started & it’s hard for users to judge and decide which new version they should upgrade to.

During an upgrade

01 Low visibility of system status

Previous GUI doesn’t show upgrade progress which left users feeling unsure and led to a distrust of the system.

02 Difficult troubleshooting process

Error messages are hard to find and it’s not easy to understand

Design impact

My work and case study got a lot of attention from the whole organization’s design leaders and product managers. I was asked to present to different product teams and has documented my design rationale both verbally with documentation and visually with design files.

Post my internship, the organization used my design work process and deliverables as a template to generalize a better upgrade process across other Dell enterprise products.