IBM Bluemix for iOS
iOS, 2016
IBM Bluemix for iOS gives developers nearly instant access to their cloud application health, urls, and key management actions from anywhere, at anytime. This project started out in IBM Design Bootcamp, continued as a 10% project and eventually Beta launched at IBM InterConnect 2016.
My role as a UX designer on the project included leading generative, evaluative and competitive research, creating storyboards, defining functional and content requirements, task flows, information architecture, low to medium fidelity prototypes (and if you must know, filling out legal, government, and marketing paperwork).
Application developers can host a wide variety of applications in the cloud. Anything from a hackathon project, to a client demo, to a billion dollar service. Some of these critical applications need to be up and running all the time. While rarely the intention, they can go down unexpectedly. Whether it’s due to a runtime error, memory leak, traffic spike, change in dependency, a region or platform outage, the developer needs to know and respond within seconds even if they are away from their computer.
cloud applications can go down unexpectedly … the developer needs to know and respond within seconds even if they are away from their computer.
During our research with developers, we heard that most will have a laptop nearby the majority of the time. However, sometimes a developer can be away from their computer and still need to be very hyperaware of the status of their app and ready to respond if it changes. This could be for a conference where the app or new features will be demoed, meetings with clients, traveling for work, and big releases, just to name a few.
We also conducted an evaluation of the current Bluemix experience on the phone, competitive analysis of similar mobile apps, tested different concepts with several developers and iterated based on their feedback. Ultimately we found some key problems with the current experience as well as a few things that they needed to be able to do anytime, anywhere.
Painpoints
“It takes me a long time just to get to my app.”
“Sometimes I’ll be asked to restart an application and I can’t do it until I get back to my desk.”
“I didn’t know my app was down until someone emailed me about it.”
Design Opportunities
This helped us frame what a mobile application could do for a developer. What if it could …
- Reduce time to check application health
- Ease anxiety that an application is working as expected
- Reduce time to react when something goes wrong
Bluemix for iOS
Bluemix for iOS is the fastest way of monitoring and reacting to changes in application health from anywhere, at anytime.
IBM Bluemix for iOS gives developers nearly instant access to their cloud application health, urls, and key management actions from anywhere, at anytime.
