Problem Statement

Double-Take software is a global leader in data migration and backup business. In the past one of our core business is migrating data between on-premise data centers, or from on-premise data center to virtual machines. As more and more companies are moving their data center into the cloud now, the business requires us to be able to move on-premise data to the cloud, or between cloud storages.

Goal

We had a thick client console that was used by tens of thousands of customers, with both positive and negative feedbacks. As the business is changing, it provided us the opportunities to build a new data migration experience born in the cloud.

My Role

Lead designer for reimaging data migration product experience. Prototype interactive web interface use:

Axure, Ilustrator for design

HTML, CSS and a bit Angular JS for prototype

Persona: IT Administrator

Customer Research

I read through the help documents, observed how customers using the product, and conducted several customer interviews to investigate customer painpoints.

"Pre-migration" Task Analysis

Log into the portal

Quick start for first time users to setup environments and discover servers quickly.

If customer does not want to go through the quick start wizard, a conventional way to start this is going throught the environment page.

Server page displays all the servers from differnt environments.

There are different ways to create migration: customer can access the migration wizard through the dashboard, on migration page, and from server page directly.

"During-migration" Task Analysis

Migration page with individual migrations and migration groups

Click on migration name, customer can see migration detail.

"Post Migration" Task Analysis

Investigate migration summaries, histories and target system health

General Options, Templates, Defaults

Result

Leveraging the customer persona’s lifestyle, we created two clients for customers to use. A web client for customer to make configurations and large workloads, and a mobile client for customers to monitor the progress of migration.

The technology enables Double-Take to migrate between different data centers, while we partner with Microsoft Azure first to help customers conduct migration from the ground to Azure cloud, and from AWS to Azure. Double-Take Cloud Migration boosts a smooth customer experience and modern user interface for customers to easily migrate data from on-premise data center to Azure. Customer care also benefits from an easy monitoring experience to answer customers’ question. The new product attracted an acquisition from a bigger company also in the data migration and availability industry.