Enterprise Web App for IT Monitoring
Project Overview
I worked on Live Optics for Dell for over 7 years, first as a contractor at an agency whilst working on other projects, and then at Dell as the UX Design & Product Marketing Team Lead for 2.5 years in a startup-style group within the company.
Live Optics is free, industry-standard software used to collect, visualize and share data about IT infrastructure. It's essentially a donation to the IT industry by Dell Technologies to promote transparency in IT requirements gathering, with funding provided by Dell, Microsoft, Intel, Broadcom, and others.
I took the barebones legacy Win32 app and created a cloud-based web app that eventually developed into a full software suite of tools.
Leading two other designers, I was responsible for user experience and visual design, information architecture, brand standards and marketing. Much of my time was spent planning & designing new functionality and using research and analytics to evaluate the UX of existing functionality and make improvements.
Focus Areas
- UX/UI Design
- Design System Development
- Responsive Web App Design
- Brand & Logo Development
- Content Strategy & UX Writing
- Information Architecture
- Print Collateral & Environmental Graphics
- Creative Direction & Project Management
- Native Windows App Design
My Role
I was responsible for user experience and visual design, information architecture, brand standards and marketing. Much of my time was spent planning & designing new functionality and using research and analytics to evaluate the UX of existing functionality and make improvements.
I worked closely with software engineers and architects, product managers, quality assurance (QA) engineers, and stakeholders in an agile software development process, while leading and mentoring two designers.
I also acted as a project manager at times, facilitating communication between stakeholders and team members to meet deadlines, assigning work, and writing project specs and user stories for other designers and developers.
My other responsibilities included:
Planning & designing new functionality and using research and analytics to continually evaluate the UX of existing functionality and make improvements.
Ensuring visual consistency through the development of a design language system and by performing visual QA after development of designs.
Overseeing user research by writing surveys and user testing scripts, planning testing strategies, and implementing and interpreting user analytics.
Communicating UX principles and patterns to leadership, engineering and product managers.
Creating both digital and print marketing assets, presentations, and any visuals needed by the team, as well as conceptual designs for potential investors.
About Live Optics
Live Optics is a platform used by over 200,000 users globally to gain insights into server environments. It helps IT administrators and service providers monitor system health, identify bottlenecks, and plan upgrades, offering clear data visualizations and streamlined workflows to make complex information actionable and accessible.
It is highly scalable, able to collect and display data from a single laptop, to an entire datacenter, to virtual environments with tens of thousands of virtual machines. It displays high-level aggregate data visualizations while also allowing users to filter and drill down to individual nodes for extremely granular detail.
When presenting to Dell IT sales groups across the country, I was often told "I couldn't do my job without Live Optics" which was always so rewarding to hear!