Owning a Product Design Project

Project Timeline: Design (Jan 10, 2022 — June 30, 2022)
Implementation: Winter Release (Dec 2022)

A couple of months back, I got an opportunity to work on a uniquely ambitious project for Rubrik, the Dashboard Customization. As this experience helped me uplift my skills as a Product Designer, I want to reflect back and talk about some of the major challenges I faced, how I overcame them and what I learned from them.

Owning the project

As with any cross-functional effort involving multiple stakeholders, taking product feature decisions was quite challenging for us. I recognized this as an opportunity to share design and product collaboration techniques by taking a lead over the overall progress from the design end.

Design is the first step of the project kickoff. However, for a unique feature like customization, I wanted to make sure that both the product team and the engineering team were on the same page. Scheduling meetings with globally distributed teams at a common time frequently with the team members was one of the early hurdles to pass on the project. I scheduled weekly syncs that worked for all the key stakeholders. During these meetings, I shared weekly design progress. I took this opportunity to identify technical and non-technical concerns from cross-functional teams.

Another aspect of owning the project from my perspective was active participation in UX Research. ‘Making a design decision’ was very challenging for the product team. This slowed my work in the early stages of design because I spent a lot of time thinking about what would work best for the customers. But as I started connecting with my senior designers, they suggested that I start working on the designs and validating them with our customers. I collaborated with the UX Research team and actively participated in every customer call. We validated our design ideas with several customers including both internal stakeholders and external customers. Although we changed a couple of designs, now, I was confident that those changes would benefit our customers.

Lastly, Design Q/A is an essential part of Rubrik’s design process. As designers, we want to make sure that the implemented designs and interactions resonate with the designs that were handed off. After a careful Design QA period, this feature has been launched and currently, we are reaching out to customers to understand their overall experience about this feature.

First Dream Big; then cut into phases

My manager says “Sky’s the limit”and he was right. During the initial conversation about the customization feature, I talked to a lot of fellow designers, Product Managers, and engineers. The meaning of customization was different for different people. While some of them talked about mobility and being able to save a view, others mentioned widget-level customization. All ideas made a lot of sense.

But, we cannot overboard the product with too many bells and whistles that clutter the experience for our customers. In order to define the features, I set up multiple meetings with senior SMEs who have interacted with customers in the past. This discussion allowed us to analyze the timeline from a design and development perspective. Eventually, we divided the features into two phases.

In the first phase, we focused on the primary features that make a dashboard customizable. This includes the widget’s mobility and resizability, adding a new widget from any dashboard to an existing dashboard, the ability to save the new dashboard configuration, and also the ability to restore to the standard dashboard settings.

In the second phase, we plan to incorporate advanced features. Some of these features allow users to modify content within a widget; for example, view the storage available for the top 5 clusters instead of 3. Additionally, we also plan to roll out phase 1 to our customers, and gather feedback that will help us enhance the overall experience of customization.

Give Back to the Design System

At Rubrik, we aim for product component consistency but also take advantage of new opportunities to introduce new design components for the design system library. Below, I have listed some of these new components:

Widget Sizes:

Reuven Yamrom, our Principal Product Designer introduced multiple widget sizes that we use for different dashboards and plan to use for future dashboards. This predefined set of widget sizes makes it easier to customize every new dashboard in Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) making it scalable.

Sliding Side Tray:

The sliding tray opens on hover and collapses after removing the cursor from the hitzone. This tray acts as the widget library where users can interact to drag new widgets. Reuven and I explored the position of the tray, and the background color to maintain consistency.

In another project where Anam Bhatia (Senior Product Designer) was working on creating a new settings page design, we collaborated to incorporate the expand/collapse behavior onto the settings page. As a result, we provided more real estate for both views.

Edit Mode Banner:

The research feedback revealed the need of making the edit mode distinct for the users. In collaboration with Product Design leadership, we introduced a banner with information about the edit mode.

Later on, I reused this component in the Support Impersonation project. In this view, the Rubrik Support Staff team needed to know that they were impersonating a customer’s RSC environment.

Resize & Move view:

We started by introducing the resizability and mobility of widgets for one dashboard. In the future, there will be opportunities to use this as a template to introduce customizability to all dashboards.

Think & Act Proactive, Help Each Other

One thing I have learned throughout my design journey at Rubrik is that it is important to make the design review teams aware ahead of time. Recently, I worked on a project with a strict timeline of 2 weeks. Within these 2 weeks, we needed to complete the design mocks, visual design review, and UX copy review. Before starting to work on any mocks, I informed the UX copy team about a potential review so that they could adjust some time for this project.

I used a similar approach for a customizable dashboard project. As we were facing difficulties making the ‘RIGHT’ decision, I connected with the Research team to keep them aware of potential research. Eventually, we conducted in-depth validation research that helped us improve our designs.

Generally, the Visual Review team, UX Copy team, and UX Research team have a lot on their plate because they are associated with a lot of projects. Depending on the complexity of the project, it takes time to understand the context of each project and then review them. My rule of thumb is to inform the teams prior to the completion of the design so that they can adjust their schedules accordingly.

Don’t wait; talk to the SMEs and begin

I am sure there has been time for everyone when you did not have any domain knowledge or past experiences working on a similar subject. My suggestion may not be a new one. I had never created a customizable dashboard in the past. I could start researching dashboards that support a customizable feature but instead I opted to reach out to senior designers, developers, and Product Managers. This worked out very well for me. I started by looking at the existing platforms suggested by them and began brainstorming ideas for RSC dashboard customization.

How do I handle imposter syndrome or bugging others for help or demo? Am I disturbing them with silly questions? This question comes to mind often and I had asked these questions to 3 team leaders at Rubrik. Here are the answers that helps me every time:

“No question is stupid.”

“Helping you is my job as a manager. If I do not help you, then I am not enjoying my job.”

Reflections

My biggest learning from this project is to be quick with taking the necessary process of design including exploration, sharing with the teams, and user research validation to come up with a feasible outcome. Owning the project and pushing your team to possibility is blissful. The design and development team collaboration is very crucial from the beginning- especially for unique features like resizing and moving widgets.

This project has been a rollercoaster ride. My biggest learning from this project is team collaboration and motivation. I want to thank Tiffany Zheng (Senior Product Designer, Design Systems) for suggesting me to validate the first mature version of our design with the customers. A huge shout out to Jenny Li (Senior UX Researcher) and Priyanka Raju (UX Research Manager) for leading an indepth research that helped us improve the user experience for the first phase of the project. Lastly, I am very grateful and want to give a huge shoutout to Reuven Yamrom who has been the biggest support in bringing this project to reality.

If you’d like to learn more about how Rubrik’s design team is creating simple design solutions for complex problems, life at Rubrik and more, check out our Medium Page! You can also check our Career Page to make an impact and accelerate your growth!