MY ROLE

At Azure BCDR, Business Continuity and Data Recovery, I was responsible to design experiences for various process involved in backup of files, folders, SQL and various site recovery techniques for a BCDR services offered by Azure, a cloud services platform of Microsoft.

BRIEF

Business Continuiuty and Data Recovery, which is now known as Azure Site Recovery. Unlike Azure DevOps, Azure Site Recovery team followed a sperate UX standards which made sure the sanctity of Design-led Development. The UX Benchmarking was based on System Usability Score and if the score of developed environment is below 80% the UX flow needs to revisited. It was a unique research and design experience, UX benchmarking helped in coherent cloud experience. My main challanges were to stick to the design guidelines while maintaining the integrity of the business flow.

Understanding the business process

Migration from on-presmise solution to the cloud is a configuration scenario. The end user needs to configure a host at the server, once required number of virtual machines are succesfully installed at the host the end-user need to configure the backup client. Depending upon the packages user are able to define the frequency of backups to be done. Once setup is done they can now configuring Monitoring, Reporting and Alerts of backups.

DESIGN LED DEVELOPMENT

Design at Microsoft Azure mainly required consistency checks and adhering to design guidelines while maintaining the user flow simple. Azure design system is quite unique, since these complex configurations needs to be highly intuitive we needed to think any business requirement as series of steps which can horizontally scale out as user demand requires. In simpler terms, steps were divide into series of horizontal panes which is added or removed based on a demand. Instances created on horizontal panes would help end user remain in the context while also focused on the tasks at hand. For any business requirement our goal was to create simple flows.

Our design process involved putting all our hypothesis and assumptions on the white-board along with key stakeholders. Based on our user persona, we would prioritize the scenarios and optimise the flow for the process such as Onboarding, Configuring Backups, Monitoring and Reporting Backups. This is a simple example of the Email Alerts configuration.

Additionally I created Onboarding experience to Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for cloud migration through a guided UX in a web portal to enable site recovery in their organisation. It involved series of compliances checks that user needed before enabling ASR. Careful attention was paid to error handling.