IBM Cloud Foundry
Redesign, 2016
IBM Bluemix as a platform was expanding to incorporate a completely new side of cloud computing: infrastructure services. Our entire design team of 60 needed to rethink how some of it current compute offerings fit into this new platform. I lead the redesign of IBM Cloud Foundry which launched at the IBM InterConnect 2016 conference.
I collaborated with other designers who owned areas such as core platform navigation, services, and containers. We worked closely with our Austin-based product managers and Chinese engineering team.
My role on this project involved conducting a content audit of the previous Cloud Foundry experience, revisiting key flows, heuristic analysis, information architecture, and low-mid fidelity wireframes. I leveraged previous usability research and design components from the core platform team. I also worked with a visual designer for the final styling.
Bluemix is a cloud platform where enterprise companies can run and scale their applications and workloads. Typical options for running applications can vary from highly configurable, more expensive bare metal servers to no configuration, low cost OpenWhisk actions. Cloud Foundry applications fall in the middle of the compute spectrum, giving developers looking to start moving to the cloud, an open source option which is easy to scale and requires very little configuration.
Bluemix started out with Cloud Foundry as its only deployment option. With more coming, such as Docker containers and infrastructure offerings, the design needed to scale as well as maintain consistency across the platform.
Main areas to scale and unify
- Header
- Left navigation
- Services
- Cost
We needed to understand how developers use Cloud Foundry and were able to leverage previous design research and usability testing to do so. Most developers will use Cloud Foundry through a command line interface.
We learned that most developers use Bluemix to view the latest deployment, visit the URLs, view the logs as well as connect new services like databases and APIs.
By taking our content audit, key tasks and flows for Cloud Foundry we were able to collaborate with other designers and product managers to conceptualize and iterate on designs that would allow for future growth of the platform.
This was the design we launched at IBM InterConnect 2016. The top tabs ended up moving back to a left navigation for World of Watson 2016 and Bluemix ended up shifting to a light theme but the underlying information architecture and user experience remained the same.
