Object Storage
As the volume of data in the world continues to grow exponentially, how can we make storage management easier for IT admins and developers?
Project Details
Company
Nutanix
Duration
1 year (2018-2019)
Team
2 PMs, 1 designer, 10+ engineers
Main Skills
UX Strategy, UX design, UI design
Background
The (data) world actually runs on object storage
If not for object storage, Facebook wouldn’t be able to store the hundreds of millions of photos its users upload a day. Spotify wouldn’t be able to store all its song files, and government companies wouldn’t be able to store crucial content like surveillance videos and satellite images.
Object storage is the leading solution for storing unstructured data (e.g. photos, videos, songs, and documents), and it excels over other storage architectures like file and block storage in performance and scalability.
Technical Details
Object storage is one type of storage architecture
In the following diagram, I have supplied a visual representation of each storage system.
Each system is storing three files (one orange, one pink, and one purple square).
In block storage, the individual files are broken down into pieces and stored in various locations. In file storage, files are kept whole but you must traverse down a hierarchical path to retrieve a specific one. If a path is long, retrieving the file will take longer, which makes the architecture difficult to scale. In object storage, files are interestingly referred to as “objects” and are stored with their metadata, which means the path to retrieve the file is short and immediate.
Competitors in the Market
Differentiating ourselves from market competitors
In a $17 billion object storage market, Amazon s3 is the leading competitor. While I looked at screenshots of their product for understanding the concept of object storage, I more often referred to the more consumer-friendly and modern designs of DigitalOcean, a smaller, yet mighty, company with their own delightful object storage solution.
My Role
I led the UX design and delivered all appropriate artifacts
I designed the interface that IT admins would use to set up object storage (similar to setting up and configuring Google Drive or Dropbox before you, as the consumer, log in to create folders and store files).
I mostly worked in medium to high fidelity since the Nutanix design team had created a mature design system with every component one could possibly imagine, but upon reflection, I could have worked more in low-fidelity in the early stages to encourage more relevant team feedback and open collaboration.
Defining Personas
Crafting personas from past research
Every organization has an IT team that is responsible for managing data center operations (e.g. keep the WiFi up and running, set up networks, add more storage, etc.). With the help of my product managers and past research conducted by the design team, I crafted three primary personas.
Two customer calls with MutuiOnline, an Italian mortgage company and Vector Informatik, a software and engineering company in the automobile sector, confirmed the information above. I received other customer insight by proxy via the product manager companies like Home Depot, T-Mobile, Northrup Grumman and more.
Use Case
Some companies are legally required to archive data
One of the most common use cases for object storage is archiving long-term data. Some companies, like hospital and legal companies, have audit requirements to keep files unaltered for a certain number of years. As a result, the object storage UI needs a way for users to “lock” a group of files so that all documents in that group are read-only, or uneditable.
This is a “write once, read many” occurrence, officially abbreviated as WORM, an acronym widely used in the object storage world.
High Fidelity Mockups
A textbook case of enterprise UI
Viewing groups of documents was managed through a traditional enterprise experience. In the following design, I created a table to display the different groups of files, one CTA to create a new group, and several action buttons that can be enacted on one or multiple file groups.
Clicking on the CTA to “create a bucket” will then bring up the following popup.
Reflections
No, I would not design it the same way now
Yes, there are two banners in this mockup, but the blue one only shows up in extreme edge cases whereas the yellow one is always present. That said, I no longer believe this to be a suitable design solution, given how common I’ve learned that “banner blindness” is.
Instead, I’d make the interaction more engaging, since users must be aware of the information present in the yellow banner (it says that this action will become permanent in 24 hours). So, I’d likely require that the user type something (e.g. a specific word, perhaps “PERMANENT”) into an input box. That way, they will be more inclined to read to understand why there is an extra level of confirmation.
A Small Win
Making the experience more user friendly
Speaking of the yellow banner, I negotiated hardcore for the specific information that was included, mainly, the feature that the setting will become permanent only 24 hours setting it, because adding the feature would allow for error correction in case the user sets the setting on the wrong group of files.
The main reason why this was such a difficult negotiation was because our main competitor, Amazon, does not allow for this flexibility, and our team had insisted, up to this point, that every feature of our solution be one-to-one with Amazon’s s3 solution (to make the transition from Amazon to Nutanix an easier one, they said).
For context, this is Amazon’s UX. Notice how in the messaging, there is no grace period for correcting the action once enabled.
To change the team’s way of engineering-focused thinking, I brought up airline UX as justification, and stated that just like how it’s common on all airline websites that a user has 24 hours to cancel a flight once they’ve booked it and receive a full refund, we should similarly allow for error correction and a change of plans.
And More
This is only one small piece of the project
But I focused on it because it’s the most interesting and so that this case study did not end up being too long. Thanks for making it to the end!