Storage, Mobile, Design and in between

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The first time I met a mobile application was in 2008. I said to myself, “This is revolutionary and cool!"

Since then, I’ve used hundreds of mobile applications. Some of them games, other business applications, but with both, I never really understand the revolution. 

It was in 2011 when I understood for the first time that it’s not just "cool" as I realized in 2008. I understood for the first time what this revolution meant.  “A mobile app is a marketing tool!" "A mobile app can increase the attach rate to my products!"

I started working in IBM Storage with this notion of managing Storage Management products.

Getting to know Storage, I understood that this market has a lot of opportunities with innovation and customer experiences driving mobile and social. We were improving in features, mass activities, accessibility and visualisation, but had not adopted well in the "new world” as other markets already had. With the announcement of the IBM Spectrum Storage family, it becomes even more relevant to have design that is emotional and attractive, with continuous usage options and socially ready, not to mention quick to deploy and the ability to analyze data.

Emotional design

Emotional design is all about getting our customer to fall “in love" with our product. Since UI (User Interface) is what attracts a user to a product, I know we can only do better in this area.

In order to complete a task, a storage administrator needs to pass over several decisions along running the task until finishing it -- in a technical forms-like app and external tools/reports which were the standard during that period. Adopting the "new world" means we can actually create a Storage Management UI that the user can decide quicker and easier, integrating all his tools into the application with a sense of gamification that will also add delights to his daily work.

Attractive design

Our applications need to be attractive in terms of visual design. In the mobile era today the demands for out of the box design and delighters are much more than ever and we need to keep up the pace, even for the enterprise. Don’t forget, our users are the same users of other mobile applications and we need to look just as cool.

Continuity

The mobile era is giving us a world of various devices that we can’t ignore, especially since the BYOD period. Moving between devices in a flexible way is a requirement, not a "nice to have" anymore. Moreover, our customers want to get information quickly to their hand-held device at work or wherever they are. We want to provide them many channels to stay up-to-date.   

Social

The social era made me understand that where there is a team of employees, a social must be! A way to share thoughts, activities, get approvals from my boss, tell the others that I am sick today so no one is allowed to touch my storage systems, etc. Since our customers are located inside a team of storage administrators, they need today, more than ever, the social aspect in their workplace. We needed a way to make our customer say "Like! Comment..."

Quick deployment, try and buy

Storage products have areas to improve in the try and buy methodologies -- the deployment process of Storage in a customer site to have it faster and easier.

Additionally, increasing hardware capacity is a task that we need to make quicker and lighter in order to make it a delightful one.  Our customers are using multiple storage solutions from IBM. Their management applications to each one of them looks a bit different and needs an alignment in order to feel as if they are all from the same family. Once using one management app they can use another from the same family without any ramp-up.

Analytics

The amount of data the storage administrator holds today is huge, and as the amount of data keeps growing and growing, the decision making becomes more challenging.

We want our customers to have the insight to make fast informed decision with less operational costs. Same for provisioning and monitoring tasks. We want them to be able to trouble shoot faster so they can concentrate on more advanced IT Operations.

Intuitive and Simple

With all the above we also need to be intuitive and simple, organizing the huge amount of information of our environment into a simple and intuitive app, so that our users wouldn't need any manual to read prior using it.

So how do these fit into the life of a storage administrator?  

We listened to our customers and going to provide soon the solutions they need: Next generation Element Manager GUI apps for the entire IBM Storage portfolio.

Like other IBM Spectrum Storage offerings, IBM Spectrum Accelerate includes an intuitive, easy-to-use Graphical User Interface (GUI) management dashboard. The IBM Spectrum Accelerate GUI can be run on any device, from desktops to iOS and Android mobile devices. The GUI, called Hyper-Scale Manager, lets clients manage technical and administrative operations through a mobile dashboard at the tap of a screen. In the era of real-time data management, mobile management of storage can help reduce storage downtime, data overload, over-provisioning and application disruption. 

The management application is built to enrich the customer experience so that all the processes, from the decision to deploy a Spectrum product, to using it and consuming IOPS within it. It is a delightful event.

Features such as social to let the team stay updated with each other. Planning and internal trends and analytics can enhance the experience of the user in each decision making junction the user is crossing every day.

This development is in progress and under NDA, designed to revolutionize the way storage administrators are managing their storage!

XIV Mobile Dashboard (for tablets and smartphones) can give you a glancing of how we think and design in a user-centered-design approach. It lets the customer track IBM storage systems while at work or at home, including hardware attached or IBM Spectrum Storage products, all in one mobile app. It is Gamified to enable our customer to emotionally "fall in love" with it using transitions and delighters. It lets the user to stay updated anywhere by using the "push notifications" feature to get live events thrown from his storage systems, even at home. Its installation and use are intuitive and fast.

Most importantly - its cool!

XIV Mobile Dashboard links:

App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/il/app/ibm-xiv-mobile-dashboard-universal/id503500546

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ibm.xiv.mobile.android