Challenge

Enterprise Product Redesign: Unify product user interfaces and extend functionality to improve user performance and meet the evolving needs in information technology and network operations management and security professionals.

Challenge

ASG Technologies (formerly ISM Perfman) is a leading provider of enterprise IT infrastructure capacity planning, performance management, and modeling solutions. ISM Perfman wanted to bring their tools together into an up-to-date, unified, web-based product offering as part of a larger technology upgrade to their product offerings. Each tool had been developed in a different technology over a span of nearly two decades, and each one monitored different IT infrastructure and software. The result was a collection of tools with no common pattern or logical structure unifying them.

To realize their vision to bring their tools together in a modern, unified experience, ISM Perfman’s leadership and engineering teams wanted a UX and product design team to help them identify and evaluate possible options, align priorities, and successfully guide them through the product strategy and UI redesign.

Approach

Experience by Design (EBD) started with a series of discovery and alignment workshops with ISM Perfman’s leadership and engineering teams to discuss audience and user needs, industry trends, technology constraints and opportunities, and to walk through the existing tools, current product roadmap, project timelines, and resourcing.

Next, we conducted an in-depth review and breakdown of the existing tools’ UIs and interaction patterns. We also studied competitor offerings, and compiled a brief report that summarized goals for the project, key findings and takeaways from the alignment workshops and our competitor study. The report also:

Proposed a plan that outlined priorities, activities, and timelines for the UX work stream that aligned with ISM’s product roadmap and development plans and target milestones
Provided a first cut of high-level information architecture concepts and storyboards to guide discussion during product strategy and design workshops.

We kicked off the workshops with a discussion of the concept information architecture model that would serve as an umbrella organizational structure for ISM Perfman’s tools. We also discussed storyboards for a customizable, role-based dashboard that would serve as a unified entry and home experience for users. These workshops provided a launch pad for collaborative design sessions that included a “Let’s Design the Box” workshop to guide product feature prioritization, followed by a series of whiteboard work sessions to:

Determine the viability of a role-based, customizable dashboard concept for the product
Work through and refine possible design approaches for unifying the experience and features of the various tools.
Identify and model components and features such as visualizations and charts, tables, messaging, and UI controls across the product.

Armed with this information, we went to work designing more intuitive workflows, user-friendly functionality, elegant UI component patterns, and cleaner screen layouts. The workflows, functionality, components, and screen layouts went through multiple rounds of review and iteration. Once finalized, we created detailed mockups of key screens to establish the product’s overall look-and-feel and to align with ISM Perfman’s branding.

Result

ISM Perfman received designs for a unified web-based product UI and user-friendly tools that support a broader set of IT professionals involved in planning, monitoring, and managing critical IT operations. The product:

Supported the needs of IT operations professionals working with legacy IT and network infrastructure.
Anticipated the needs of those involved in planning and maintaining new virtualized and cloud environments.
Met the needs of those working to manage and optimize hybrid IT environments that contain both legacy and new virtualized infrastructure.