A backup and restoration solution to enable admins to backup and restore the org’s data from data loss events (accidental deletions, Ransomware attacks, etc.)
My role
Design a seamless backup and restoration experience by conducting competitive studies and user interviews. Collaborated with OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint, and M365 Admin center teams to ensure a cohesive experience. Finally testing concepts with admin users in collaboration with researchers.
The team
1 designer ('tis I ), 3 teams (8 partner stakeholders), 10 Developers, 2 Product managers, 1 researcher, 0.5 Content designer.
Duration
8 months
Outcome
01
Designed the MVP and north star experience for M365 backup, now in Public Preview as part of the Syntex offering launched by Satya Nadella at Ignite 2022.
02
Designed admin product discovery and adoption UX framework and interaction patterns that will now be used across multiple Microsoft admin centres.
User jobs
Backup business critical data
Files, folders, emails, sites, settings, etc. in OneDrive, SharePoint & Exchange.
Quickly recover data from backups
in case of data loss due to accidental deletion or ransomware attacks
Track and manage
Restorations that were started and the storage that was used to take backups
Problems in existing solutions
Long setup process
Long and manual process to setup and manage backup settings
No transparency
Need to guess how much it will cost to backup data and what is the best way to optimise
Low discovery
Discovery of the product and its value by the admin is very low leading to poor adoption
Learnings from compete study and early concept testing
I have used the customer forum to validate the hypothesis we had from compete study by designing some indicative screens as stimulus.
01
Admins prefer defining backups settings in structured manner by creating backup policies
instead of defining them on an account directly.
02
Admins prefer having control on a service level (OneDrive, Exchange & SharePoint) first to manage backups and to fulfill restoration requests rather than user account level first.
03
Transparency on Cost and time is critical before enabling the service and starting the backup for the selected data
Design principles
After complete study and interviews with users some common themes started to arise which were used to define the design principles based on the user expectations
Transparency and Trust
Provide visibility on the impact for the actions before hand by setting up expectations upfront
Consistency and scalability
Maintain similar expectation to back and restore different kinds of data across all services
Efficiency
Reduce manual intervention whenever possible by giving admins ways to automate when needed.
Along with the core user tasks of backup and recovery an effective discovery framework is also needed to ensure admins see the value of the product in the right context.
Discovery and adoption experience
Discover value
Evaluate
Traditional discovery and adoption in admin space has the following issues. There are multiple ways to enhance this experience by Identifying contextual moments in the users tasks and finding the right level of interruptions after task completion.
Issue 01
Traditional Top-down selling method
Issue 02
Hard to discover a product pre-purchase
Issue 03
No way to try or experience the product before purchase
Concepts considered
01
Contextual nudges within related tasks
eg: A nudge to explore M365 backup post-identification of affected items in a data loss event flagged by anomaly detection service.
What works
Shows value at the right context after the task completion
What doesn't work
Hard to discover if the user doesn't encounter a data loss event or never interacts with anomaly detection service
02
A persistent entry point in the main navigation
Using the same space where the product will be accessed upon purchase to upsell and provide opportunity to learn about it
What works
Does not interrupt the task user is on, provides a space to communicate aspects of product
What doesn't work
Users are expected to proactively learn about the service without external nudge
03
Dashboard recommendation
based on usage
An upsell recommendation to try Backup when the number of confidential and active sites grow beyond x% monthly.
What works
High discoverability and provides control to user to quickly get started or opt out of the nudge
What doesn't work
Can come across as an ad and distract the users from not being able to diffrentiate between an insight and an upsell.
Final direction for discovery and adoption experience
Chose Concepts 1 and 2 for their contextual approach to convey product usefulness. Excluded Concept 3 (Recommendation card) as it may be perceived as ad and distraction even before admins start to use other features.
01
Contextual nudges within related tasks
+
02
A persistent entry point in the main navigation
(Short term)
Designing onboarding,
setup and use experience
Setup
Use
To have a strategic home, setup and usage experience we have asked ourselves...
-
What would make users daily life easier?
-
How can we utilize technology to aid users? (Insights on potential data to backup, etc.)
-
Where are the magic moments? The “Ah, I didn’t know I needed that..”
Concepts considered
01
A dynamic dashboard that evolves and guides the user
Enables immediate focus on next steps through intuitive page components, minimizing the need for additional guidance and reducing interface learning time.
02
A setup guide to
track progress at one place
Offers a setup progress overview, but redundancy may exist with status communicated through summary cards on the left. Building this is time-consuming as it deviates from standard design system patterns.
03
A focussed onboarding experience on day 0
Offers a setup progress overview, but redundancy may exist with status communicated through summary cards on the left. Building this is time-consuming as it deviates from standard design system patterns.
Final direction for onboarding, setup and use experience
01
A dynamic dashboard that evolves and guides the user
Selected for its reuse of existing components and patterns, crucial for expediting execution. Additionally, the concept's guidance within core UI components minimizes user interface learning time.
Designing retention mechanisms to reinforce impact and value
Track and optimise usage
Having a seamless onboarding experience is essential, but reinforcing value post-usage is equally crucial. The concepts below aim to visualize ways to achieve this goal.
Concepts considered
01
A personalised quarterly report to show impact from use
02
Active recommendations to surface opportunities to improve efficiency
As the product is in an MVP phase only certain portions of the phases below were implemented while the rest is phased out for future build based on the usage and feedback from users.
Discover value
(Future scope)
Evaluate
(Future scope)
Setup
(In production)
Use
(In production)
Track and optimise usage
(future scope)
