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| Background |
NetApp's Lifetime Key Management appliance manages keys
that an enterprise uses to encrypt its most sensitive data. |
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Banks use encryption keys to protect our accounts. E-commerce
sites use keys to safeguard our credit card data. Insurance companies
use keys to protect our privacy. The government uses keys to encrypt data
vital to national security. An organization can have hundreds of thousands
— sometimes millions — of keys to manage |
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The Lifetime Key Management appliance is something
of a marvel, but the management application had been designed by the engineers
with little input from real users. |
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| The Project |
Conducted a contextual inquiry.
Describing mediascapes and the Mscape technology succinctly was the principle
challenge. |
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A colleague and I interviewed six current users —
and a handful of others who provided useful background information. We
weren't able to visit the users in person (they were scattered throughout
the country), so we used WebEx to have them show us as much as they could
about their typical routine and the context in which they worked with
the Lifetime Key Management appliance. |
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The research led to two key discoveries:
 Users
didn't care about keys, they cared about data. Their goal was data availability
— making sure encrypted data could be decrypted and read when and
where it was needed.
Users
were manually managing keys even though that was the very thing the appliance
was supposed to be doing for them automatically |
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The second discovery — that users were doing manually
what the appliance ought to be doing automatically — became the
key problem that the new design needed to solve. |
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Created preliminary use cases.
Distilled UI patterns. The NetApp team I was working with wasn't
particularly good at writing things down. There was no PRD or MRD, nothing
that stated clearly and completely what the requirements for the user
interface — and the application — were. That made it difficult
to know exactly what I was designing. So I headed up a little project
to create use cases, to spec out each feature in enough detail for everyone
to agree on what we were doing. |
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(Example: preliminary
use cases, PDF, 188k) |
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At the same time, NetApp's full-time user experience team
was in the process of developing a standard approach to all its applications.
Unfortunately, they hadn't yet gotten around to creating guidelines for
the approach. So I reviewed all the applications they had under development
and distilled a fairly comprehensive set of UI patterns to guide my work. |
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(Example: UI
pattern, PDF, 308k) |
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Conducted a task analysis.
Identified the primary scenarios. Created a persona. Developed a mental
model. Based on the information we'd collected in the contextual
inquiry, I identified the handful of tasks that were the most essential
to users. I used those tasks to identify the primary scenarios that best
described how users were likely to use the application. |
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I created a persona that captured the archetypal user,
his goals, his responsibilities, the obstacles and frustrations he encountered
— and most importantly the fundamental misunderstanding that led
him to manage keys manually. |
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My crucial breakthrough — the key to creating an
interface that remedied the user's misconception about how to best use
the system — was to create two models. The first model illustrated
the way NetApp conceived of their system and how they represented it to
their users. The second captured the user's mental model. The two, placed
side by side, were a revelation — the two models were offset by
exactly 180 degrees from each other. NetApp's view of what users needed
was upside-down. |
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Invented a new representation
model. Created an architecture diagram. Developed use cases, wireframes,
workflows, and detailed specifications. I invented a new model
for representing the system to users — one based the users' mental
model, rather than the engineers' implementation model. |
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I created another complete set of over 100 use cases, mapping
all of the functionality in the preliminary use cases to the new model.
I spent the next several months developing workflows, wireframes, and
detailed specifications to document the new user interface. |
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(Example: use
case, PDF, 124k) |
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(Example: workflow
diagram, PDF, 660k) |
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(Example: wireframe
with specification, PDF, 456k) |
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(Example: wireframe
detail with specification, PDF, 1.1Mb) |
