Involvement

Role(s)

Product Designer

Duration

3 months

Industry

Cloud Infrastructure

Project Snapshot

Context

To harness business momentum, Foal, a cloud infrastructure startup, needed to transition from a CLI (command-line interface) to a GUI (graphical user interface). They aimed to expand their reach by making their product's value proposition evident to non-technical stakeholders while maintaining its robust technical capabilities.

Challenge(s)

Being so specialized and tech-centered, the company was the perfect example of Stage 1 on NN Group’s UX Maturity Model. Their sole design asset: their logo. Our engagement’s duration: 3 months.

Goal(s)

Migrate their Control Plane’s key features into a GUI using a scalable design workflow that would allow them to continue building it by themselves after our collaboration ended.

Design Process

I like to present my case studies using the three milestones that we can find if we squint our eyes and take a look at the Double Diamond (UK Design Council, 2003). I borrowed the methodology’s terminology to facilitate understanding, calling them Discover, Define and Deliver.

Discover

Working at an agency meant adapting our workflow to meet client needs and tight deadlines. We started by diagnosing the situation and finding the projects main challenges:

1. Highly complex business nature: ”microservice orchestration”, “Principal ACLs”. These were Foal’s day to day, most basic concepts. We needed to quickly up-skill ourselves in their terminology and operation.
2. Zero design: there were no design resources (neither people nor assets/artifacts) in the company. Not even a brandbook.
3. Time constraints: we had 3 months to go from a logo to 7 features, ready for dev work.