The challenge

Our client's executive team wanted to better understand the current experience and challenges of big data administrators in order to inform the design of their next generation release of their flagship administrative product. Their team wanted to determine how to help new users ramp up quickly and help Hadoop cluster administrators maintain cluster health, diagnose issues, and extract more value from the cluster at a glance.

The result

Through field research with Hadoop administrators, we created a set of rich user personas, illuminated pain points in the current admin journey and developed an actionable plan for the design. This enabled the client team to focus on solving the right problems and positively impact the most users with the next release. Data visualization to help users understand cluster health and isolate issues across multiple clusters was developed and tested with admins. The response to the designs were overwhelmingly positive.

My contribution

As Director of Strategy at Theresa Neil Strategy & Design, I ran the project from start to finish. I was the lead researcher conducting the field work and synthesis and continued on to manage the wire-framing, data visualization, testing, visual design and delivery of the Zeplin production assets for the scenarios. In addition, this project helped me to hone my particular flavor of data synthesis and insight storytelling which I have since presented in workshops at the University of Texas.