One of the primary reasons that I took on the work at Joyent was to fulfill my desire to work internally on products, rather than as a consultant. I also wanted to become more familiar with working with product management, specifically, and I was able to do that in this role. It was an interesting time to be working at Joyent, as Node.JS was starting to garner significant attention and the company itself was growing rapidly. I was the only UX designer to be working internally, but did work with outside consultants during my tenure.
I created interfaces for internal wikis, community portals, and the external marketing website, but want to highlight the work I did on the server management portals for both Joyent employees and external customers. Joyent had always provided cloud-hosting services, and as such did have a very basic interface for internal experts to manage servers. The interface needed an upgrade though, both to make it more usable and to include additional features.
My work on the internal portal, known as Cloud Control, included working with the 5 primary users of the tool to understand how they worked, how they used the interface, and where improvements needed to be made. I audited the existing portal to understand necessary features and worked closely with product management to understand new features to be included. Outcomes of this work included detailed sitemaps, wireframes, and eventually mock-ups.
An old, blurry photo of a quick and dirty sitemapping exercise with internal users of the Cloud Control Portal.
A more detailed version of the sitemap.
A super-detailed wireframe with mad commenting around implementation and interactions.
A mock-up of a key page on the Cloud Control portal.
In conjunction with the internal portal, I also worked on creating a portal for customers who were using the Node.JS hosting services of Joyent. This was an entirely new product offering, started as a proof of concept during a few hackathons/contests (Node Knockout) that were sponsored by Joyent. Effectively, users needed to be able to spin up, monitor and manage their servers via a simple, informative interface.
A detailed workflow diagram, used to communicate to both the product manager and the development team.
Sitemap outlining the pages on the customer portal.
A wireframe sketch created with the development team, and the corresponding mock-up.
The marketing landing page for the service, and a mock-up of a simple list page.