Teradata Intellicloud Console

As a revered analytics provider, Teradata was used to meeting customers where they were—on premise. With the rise of diverse cloud storage providers, Teradata had minimal means to help their customers leverage their cloud-based databases for the analytic needs they sought. I led the delivery of the user experience and visual design for a SaaS product that allows customers to provision and manage their public and private cloud databases (AWS, Azure, Teradata) in one place.

Client: Teradata (at Slalom)

Role: Experience Designer

Duration: 6 months

During this project, I was responsible for all interaction and visual design tasks. I collaborated with Teradata product managers directly to develop all the included features. I also extended and documented their design guidelines to meet future product needs, aligning future feature concepts with the existing product development standards.

Teradata Intellicloud Console Dashboard — The Intellicloud dashboard provided easy access to configure features such as backups, NACL configuration and other security settings.

Where were they at?

Widely known for its advanced analytics technology and services, Teradata's core strength is helping businesses drive better outcomes with data. The $2.5 billion company has led the data and analytics space for over 35 years. Teradata started offering its own cloud capabilities in 2011 and expanded into the public cloud in 2015. The goal was not only to enable popular Teradata software on AWS and Azure but also to fully empower customers with the cloud benefits of self-service, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go.

The company needed a little help speeding up its ambitious rollout of managed offerings across the leading public cloud platforms. My role on the Slalom Build team was to drive the user experience definition and delivery in partnership with the product owners to create a best-in-class service offering for Teradata customers.

While the command line remains a reliable interface for getting things done, the existing model of deploying a database was cumbersome for clients and their DBAs. When a customer wanted to start up a new database for their analytic needs, they submitted a service ticket. This in turn was subject to a queue and at the pace of Teradata's technical service team, not at the desire or speed customers require with the availability of SaaS products.

Teradata recognized they needed to evolve their analytics-central model. They could be leveraging market solutions and readily making them easily accessible to their customers and our partnering with Slalom Build made the most sense to kick off this journey. I partnered with their product managers to design all the initial features of the Intellicloud console.

What did we do?

We built a serverless SaaS product that allows customers to integrate and manage various cloud-based databases into one management console via Teradata, AWS and Azure.

My Role: — Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Visual Design
Deliverables: — High-fidelity flows, Invision prototypes

What challenges did we work through?

Teradata didn't have deep experience in user-centered software design. Their process was driven by product managers that we're used to working in a waterfall method, i.e. throwing loose requirements over a wall. In partnership with the project and technical managers, we patiently introduced our Agile methodology to the project, setting and resetting expectations as the sprints were completed.

At the start of the project, we we're working with a loosely defined pattern library derived from Material Design guidelines. As it was often incomplete for the rising needs of the system, I introduced, iterated and then documented the interaction and visual system rules as the project progressed, culminating in extended design system documentation that was included for future development by the Teradata UX team.

Communicating with Teradata product managers was often difficult because of their schedules. They operated at higher levels and weren't as easy to collaborate with unless I got focused time with each. My strategy was to often get them to come on-site or head over to their offices to work in tandem which helped accelerate product development and better our connections.

How did it turn out?

The product was launched in early 2018. It's being utilized by clients and additional features are in active development.

More details about the project are available here

Teradata Intellicloud Features — Select screens from various full features I built for Teradata