Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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Siddharth Mankad | smmankad@gmail.com

A Mobile Device UI for Datacenter Administration

New Media Design | PGDPD
Guide: Dr Jignesh Khakhar
Sponsor: Symantec Software India Pvt. Ltd., Pune

Keywords
Mobile device user experience
Handheld device interactions
Datacenter administration
Enterprise computing

The objective of my project was to design a mobile/handheld software user-interface (UI) for the purpose of datacenter management. The target users were datacenter administrators who manage and maintain applications and other assets in datacenters, which have 1,000-10,000 servers dealing with storage in multiple proportions. Today’s young administrators have Facebook and Twitter accounts and are always on-the-go. The project, code-named Bantam, is an Android-based application that runs on smart phones and is also known as Administration Assistant.

The research phase of the project involved domain study and user interactions. Users were interviewed and the domain of enterprise computing was studied to get an idea of the design context. Personas were created after studying the users, followed by paper prototypes, low-fidelity mock-ups and finally high-fidelity mock-ups.

The aim of my study was to design the interface, product system and interactions between the user and the UI for the primary use case of datacenter administration. The scope of work involved an overview of the system, product features, wireframes of the interface, mock-ups and interactions. The final prototypes were in two forms. The first was a screen cast (video prototype) with narration to explain the entire product with its user cases and interactions. The second was a clickable app, which demonstrated the basic look and feel of the product at the TrueScale FormFactor.

The principle I followed in my project was to visualize, prototype and test the design, instead of attempting to ‘solve’ the design on paper and prototype the final version. Hands-on design was the core value which I employed here, and learnt from, as a designer.