Storage Monitoring Research Project

Dell has eight different types of storage products across different client portfolios (large, medium, and small businesses). Each storage product has a UX interface that helps monitor storage related information (such as capacity, performance, updates, etc.).
This was an open-ended project, and the research scope was later determined by my research findings and the discussions with the team. Secondary research, internal interviews, product audits and analysis, and workflow process mapping were all conducted during this internship. The Double Diamond UX research model was used for this internship research project.

Why monitoring?

• Lack of understanding of what monitoring is for storage product users

• Lack of information for what are the common and unique storage monitoring needs across different products

Problems and Challenges

• Customers goal is to have more disposable time for their IT personnel. However, the primary users IT generalists they spent about half of their time on monitoring and troubleshooting every day. That means half of their time to putting out fires and fixing issues that have already happened instead of having time to prevent these issues from happening.

• Which often resulting in support calls, as a consequence it costs millions to deal with monitoring failures related support tickets. Therefore, monitoring is having critical impacts on users and also the company.

Research Goals

• Understanding the existing definition of monitoring

• Conducting secondary and primary research

• Reinventing storage monitoring concepts and structures

• Identifying gaps and opportunities for monitoring

• Presenting findings to different teams and getting buy-ins

• Providing north star vision and immediate next steps for the team

To accomplish these goals, the research plan and process was designed and set up according to the UX Double Diamond Research Methodology.

Detailed Research Process

Secondary Research Key Findings

Monitoring is Not Simple

• Interviewed a few people about their perceptions of monitoring, and found that monitoring is not simple

• Just like when we are driving in the car, we monitor our dashboard, but also a lot of other things in the driving environment. However, do we want to also monitor tire worn out level? The road condition? If there are any scratch on the car? Monitoring could be more than what we think.

Interview

Interview Participants

• Product managers

• UX designers

• UX researchers

• Engineers

• Sales engineers

• Competitive analysis team

• Customer support team

Methodology

• Interviewed 30+ product leads and internal users

• 50 min average time spent with each

• cognitive interview

Interview Questions

Created a mind-map for interview questions to see potential linkages and gaps

Synthesize and Analysis

Based on the interviewees’ inputs, I compiled a table for product audit purposes to get a visual sense of what product is doing well for certain user needs.  All the user needs are listed as the yellow sticky notes on the left-hand side where I constantly add and modify based on the conversations with different internal users.

Then I pulled out all the user needs and the functionalities that users are looking for to conduct a card sorting exercise in order to find out if there are any common patterns and themes emerge.

Current monitoring process

UX success outcome

From all the people that I interviewed across departments, I defined the monitoring UX success outcome as below:

Three key research insights and monitoring structure

Detailed research insights are omitted here due to NDA requirements

• The Right Information

• The Right Time

• Prioritization

Opportunities and Next Steps

With the three key research insights, three major opportunities are identified for Dell to tackle:

The three opportunities are:

• to refine the information to be the right information for the users

• to support a more preventive and optimizing workflow to provide the information to the users at the right time

• to develop a systematic approach for prioritization to reach the optimal efficiency

Key next steps are identified to focus on the long term plan to operationalize these three opportunities including:

• Conducting further research on methods to communicate issues to users, AI capability for prioritization, and automated remediation

• Refining the UX vision and set UX success metrics (Quantitative and Qualitative)

• Testing the benchmark use cases and workflows across all storage products

• Aligning within the storage team and also across the Dell infrastructure group to find the deltas and align with the different groups

• Establishing the new norm of monitoring across the infrastructure group

I presented my research findings to the Dell CTO office, the Experience Design Group leaderships, different storage product’s product team (product managers, UX personnel, and engineers), and the artificial intelligence and machine learning expert groups.

Now the findings and my presentation are spread across different groups and are on the way of being operationalized to make an impact on the existing storage monitoring products at Dell. Below are some performance appraisal emails from Dell.