Cloud Product Redesign

In late 2023, our company's central product - a WebAssembly Cloud PaaS - had grown to add a lot more features and compliexity than the initial launch MVP could handle. The product needed updates to address a broader Information Architecture, more summary information of cloud resources, and more persistent state of resources across the user account.

Here, I led the design work to establish a new update to the product experience - a restructuring of the central views, IA and core workflow of the app platform interface - in collaboration with our product and engineering teams.

The goal here was not a redesign persay - but a realignment of how the product experience could better align with the current and future feature set of the product.

Our teams had built new functionality - [1] serverless AI inferencing [2] key value and sqlite data stores [3] custom domain management and more - that was available in localdev, in the CLI tooling and "under the hood" of the developer toolchain, that was not being surfaced in core cloud interface itself - hurting discoverability and adoption.

In working with product, and reviewing user insights and data points, we identified a more scalable design approach that would reshape the product to highlight the new functionality (with inline education and developer-friendly resources) and reduce user friction.

I took my initial notes and wireframes, and eloved these into rapidly a Figma prototype which was used as the way to centralize discussion and iteration with Product & Engineering.

As we aligned on the deliverables and refined the scope of work, my colleague Taylor (https://github.com/taylols) helped componentize-all-the-things and we could turn the initial protoype into a powerful system, reflecting various user states and (account level / empty statues / billing usage states etc). This prototype was then the core asset in aligning engineers and breaking out the implementation stories for engineers, as we broke the design work into sprint cycles and worked together to refactor our codebase and ultimately deliver the new product experience.

Overall, this work took place over roughly two months - with design work by myself (direction, top-level goals, ui outline, implementation/css notes) and taylor (additional prototyping, mobile views, user research).

We worked closely with Kenzie - Cloud PM, and Matt (lead UI engineer) and a contracted team of front-end developers on the implementation work.