MATLAB Drive

Cloud Technology

Product Details: MATLAB Drive

Product Updates: Led UX updates from August 2016 (Beta) – June 2017

Cloud Storage Application for increasing collaboration between engineers on desktop, mobile, and in the web browser.

UX Outcomes

Understand Stakeholders
Ease-of-use
Discoverability
Trust
Self-service
Industry Best Practices
Engagement and Delight
Reduce Time on Task
Reduce Help Desk Support Calls
Increase Task Completion
Increase System Usability
Create Reusable Components
Leverage Design System
Mobile-Friendly UI

Leadership

Contributed to UX Artifact Repository for Enterprise
Creation of Reusable Components
Cross-Team Collaboration with UX Designers, Visual Designers, Program Managers Developers, IT Architects, QA Engineers, Technical Writers
Cross-Function Collaboration with Desktop, Mobile, Web Browser product teams across the US and UK
Negotiated Timeline and Time Zone Constraints

Services

UX Research
Usability Testing
Interaction Design
Ideation / Brainstorming
Facilitation of Team UX Activities
Teaching UX Methods to Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, Technical Writers
Feature Prioritization Methods
Design Evaluation Methods
UI Testing
Team Agile Ceremonies

Deliverables

UX Plan
Research Reports
Stakeholder Presentations
Wireframes
Mockups
Prototypes

Challenge

Professors, students and professional engineers who use MATLAB files cannot easily collaborate and save their files to the cloud from within the MATLAB IDE.
MATLAB files are not easy to share with others for collaborative work.
Recovering deleted MATLAB files is impossible from MATLAB Online and MATLAB Mobile.
Uploading multiple files at once is not allowed in MATLAB Online.
The root cause of errors and status of the application is unclear.

Solution

Created a web application for accessing MATLAB files from any device.
Enhanced features in MATLAB desktop application for cloud storage.
Designed solutions for sharing MATLAB files.
Designed solutions for recovering deleted files.
Designed solutions for multi-file upload.
Designed solutions for error handling and status reporting.
Collaborated with a team of UX Designers, Visual Designers, Program Managers Developers, IT Architects, QA Engineers, Technical Writers across the US and UK.

Discovery

The start of any project requires identifying who the target users are and what goals they hope to accomplish. I worked with a team from Marketing, Development and UX to come up with a list of target users and their goals. This list was of personas was referenced each time a new feature was considered.

I led the team of developers, designers, technical writers in design studio sessions where collaborative brainstorming of possible solutions was explored. After the group sessions I consolidated the ideas into mockups for usability testing with target users.

Usability Testing was my favorite method of gathering feedback. I created tasks and allowed customers to walk through paper prototypes and clickable prototypes in order to give the team feedback on design proposals. Based on the testing the team was able to validate the requirements for the feature and identify new requirements for future releases.

Feedback from usability testing was collected by UX and Development. Based on the feedback we were able to validate design decisions, make adjustments to features and create a backlog of enhancement requests.

Facilitation of team meetings between the business, engineering and design was essential for creating psychological safety for brainstorming collaborative solutions to meet user needs for MVP.

Design

A challenge of building a new web application from the ground up is that we did not have in product references to diagnose. A “current state” for features did not exist. This led to a lot of external research and evaluation of competitor applications. The proposal for recovering deleted content in the cloud storage application was based on competitor research, design pattern research and usability testing of multiple variations.

Once a design was approved it was finalized by visual design and development. The months of research and testing contributed to a highly scalable and easy to use application for recovering deleted content in the MathWorks cloud.

The UX work was cross-platform spanning mobile, web, and desktop. I worked on end-to-end workflows that crossed multiple platforms. The development teams were remote (UK) and local to the Boston area. Usage of the MathWorks cloud storage application increased substantially with each new feature designed and developed.