SMART DOCK CONSOLE
Lead and solo UX/UI designer for a new enterprise grade connected device web management platform, advanced dynamic telemetry dashboard, and provisioning tools. The Lenovo Smart Dock Console is a set of desktop and web-based tools for IT administrators to streamline provisioning and management of their organizations network-connected docks.
Overview
Lead UX/UI Designer (2020-2021)
Product vision, insights gathering, competitive review, information architecture, mood boarding, detailed visual design, redline UX/UI specifications
Additional Team Members
1 Researcher, 2 Product Managers,
1 Internal Sr. SW Engineer, External Development Contractor (SW Engineers)
Tools
Adobe XD (Task flows and production assets), PowerPoint/Excel (Dev reviews)
Quick Summary.
Lenovo is developing two web-based management consoles and desktop-bound provisioning tools to help IT decision makers streamline how they provision and update USB-C and TBT-4 cable docks. With our new docks having a built-in IoT chipset and network access capability, Lenovo will enable ITDMs to provision and manage their network connected docks via the cloud. I worked with Lenovo stakeholders and an external software development partner to define the product user experience. Armed with requirements documentation and a small set of development reference screens, I was responsible for designing a scalable user experience solution that enables and facilitates ITDMs to provision and manage network connected docks within an organization.
What was my process?
1 Requirements Gathering
Made sense of the overall portfolio strategy, product priorities, platform functional requirements, and reference solution design.
2 Insights Gathering, Competitive Assessment, and Mood Boarding
Gathered customer needs and pain points from prior research on an older platform. Analyzed UI structures of existing designs.
3 Task Flows and Feature Exploration
Established critical task flows and made sense of what telemetry data could be presented in visually useful ways.
4 Iterative UI Design and Research
Built out the UI and respective dashboard widgets. Maintained weekly review of UI with SW development. Conducted a global study to determine how well features, functions, and task flows were understood.
5 Design Tracking
UX/UI tracking, accessibility, and branding guidelines adherence ahead of ship support.
Additional Overview.
Working alongside internal development stakeholders and our external partner, I defined the information architecture, user flows, and a visual design language to maintain consistency across our four console and provisioning entry points. Although not listed in the requirements documentation, I recommended the team pursue a content dashboard to allow ITDMs and internal stakeholders to view sets of device metrics in a more accessible and actionable manner. I explored and challenged what telemetry data might and should be accessible between devices and consoles to present within the dashboard; including how these metrics are calculated, displayed, interacted with, and filtered. Beyond our tried and true overall utilization and device firmware status' widgets, I explored how we might use location tags to expedite the review and updating of devices in a more contextually focused manner. I also recommended the team incorporate a port utilization widget to track port activity to assist future hardware product solution decision-making. The dashboard and its contents were well received, leading to both Lenovo and our external partner to pursue development for first release.
I'm most proud of the filtering options and tertiary menu behaviors I designed into the web-consoles. The filters allow for rapid consolidation of devices via a myriad of options across both the device list, dashboard, and device settings. The device settings GUI for handling updates were designed to scale across a single selected device and upwards of thousands of selected devices for batch operations.
This project has been an incredible learning experience; playing a critical role in the product vision and strategy.
