Project
Redesign the entire user experience for Western Digital’s flagship product – My Cloud. This is a personal cloud which customers own and access from any device.
Role
As the Principal Designer and interim Director, I helped establish methodologies, design processes, vision pieces, prototypes, responsive design framework, interaction patterns, visual language, fostered a design culture where everyone honed their craft, built strong relationships with stakeholders, and evangelized UX strategies throughout the entire organization.
The following steps were taken to evaluate our primary competition... 1) Printed onboarding flows of major competitors. 2) Labeled sections of each flow to quickly identify similarities at a macro level. 3) Added interaction touch points to highlight transitions from screen to screen. 4) Facilitated working sessions across the entire organization to identify the following using sticky notes:
- what IS working (green)
- what IS NOT working (red/orange)
- general input (yellow)
The sticky notes from the competitive analysis were rearranged into groups. High level patterns began to emerge. This became the starting point for building product requirements.
An innovative approach to storyboarding was created to help communicate new product concepts. This was very effective in telling a story at a macro level while providing details at a micro level. The storyboard included customer profile images, swim lanes, and interaction touch points to highlight transitions from screen to screen.
Established and applied visual language across entire ecosystem. Met with Senior Executives and partnered with Marcom team to evangelize the new look and feel.
Consulted with Marcom team to ensure the gateway to our new My Cloud product was a great experience. Lead working sessions for the entire mycloud.com website, which included: page layout, navigation, interaction, visual language, content strategy, imagery strategy, and telling a compelling story.
A great amount of attention was given to simplifying the onboarding process, as well as helping to create an emotional connection to the My Cloud product and brand
The list view is arranged by rows and columns. Actions can be performed at a folder or item level, such as: share, copy, move, delete, download, and upload. A panel appears at the top of the page when timely promotions are displayed.
The layout of the grid view is visually compelling. Images are displayed for photos, videos, and cover art. While the height of tiles are fixed, the width of photos are cropped using a sophisticated algorithm.
We created a short video to help convey high level strategic thinking for our next gen product and presented this during our organization's wide all-hands meeting. This approach was very successful in helping the audience focus on ways we make the user experience more meaningful and delightful for our customers.
We explored ways of simplifying the onboarding experience for both the device owner as well as any additional users. We created concept maps and went through several rounds of storyboards to arrive at the final concept.
To help the organization gain a clear understanding of the vision, the team created a slide show and acted this out the various character roles live in front of the organization.