MyRackspace is used by Rackspace’s largest customers to manage their dedicated cloud infrastructure. At the time of this analysis, the control panel was more than 15 years old.
The purpose of this project was to gain a baseline understanding of our users and product so that we could know what improvements would be most valuable to our customers.
I lead the project and received support from an additional interaction designer and the design researcher team.
We began be conducting customer experience workshops. Customers wrote about their activities and workflows in the portal. They described likes and dislikes for the current portal and assigned it a letter grade. They then described the ideal portal experience and spent a hypothetical research budget on suggested improvements.
Business and development stakeholders and designers participated in synthesis workshops to look for big ideas and themes. We incorporated those insights into a mix-method synthesis to create the final report.
Taking the most common workflows surfaced in the customer experience workshops, I completed a detailed heuristic, identifying close to 300 violations. I analyzed the violations to identify trends and establish priority.
I created workflow maps highlighting the locations of violations.
Product management and I collaborated to create a plan to fix the most prominent and high priority violations.
I reviewed site analytics and found users spent a majority of time in a small part of the portal. Dozens of pages had few or no page views in previous weeks. We identified duplicate and unused pages we could remove to simplify the experience.
We created an application map and site map to identify the places users trouble completing tasks because the had to bounce between different sections of the portal–a pain point identified in research.
We conducted a card sort based on the most prevalent actions identified in the customer experience workshop and through site analytics. We used this information to propose a new information architecture and validated it with a tree study.
