Results – Sold for 16x
Designing a new platform from scratch in 1.5 years is hard work. Still, by implementing design-level thinking methodologies and modern design principles, I was able to deliver a platform that is modern, intuitive, and could be a game-changer for the IT industry.
Seattle Business Magazine
I was on stage when BitTian won #1 for the best company to work for. The team culture and product focus were some of the most high-performance software teams I’ve worked on.
Public Launch (GTM): 4/2017
As the lead design manager, I was responsible for the entire experience. I owned key platform features, and once the UI Models (MVP) were in place, I interviewed and hired 3 UX Designers to hand off new features to quickly scale the platform. Then I focused on updating the Dashboard, Delivery center, Entity management, Activity feed, Subscription billing, and 3rd party OEM task workflows.
Dominic Pouzin – CTO
Quote: “Geoffrey is a very talented senior UX designer and would be a huge asset to any company, especially those with a focus on enterprise products. At BitTitan, Geoffrey helped our product UI evolve from “amateurish” to professional / on-par with top SaaS solutions. Geoffrey’s key strength is creation of new UX concepts and high-level look-and-feel experience for enterprise products.
Beta Launch: 10/2016
Among the improvements adopting the new UI-Kit were the Dashboard, Service Center, Activity feed, Subscription billing, Delivery Center, and Cost Reporting, and around 20 new IT service solutions were implemented.
Systems Library – Integration
Once a new UI kit was implemented the platform began to come to life. The new kit helped speed up design/development time since UI systems patterns and common controls were consistent across the platform. We made additional layout changes to simplify the experience by introducing detailed fly-out panels and inline accordions.
Systems Library – Redesign
One challenge was designed in an old UI kit. I knew I had to modernize the platform to help BitTitan served as a trusting SaaS application. I made it a company commitment to drive a modern UI Kit–the existing grey navigation and the overall site felt like a typical Seattle day to me. I always knew the future of the site would need to be something much more modern.
Preview Launch: 7/2016
Once the platform MVP framework was in place, it was time to start integrating new feature services and onboarding new customers to the platform. The first step is to go external and start dog fooding the product to get real customer feedback. This was an exciting time for the company to be on a fast-paced high-performance phased agile development team. The culture/collaboration fostered solutions for the greater company interests. BitTitans’ motto was: “Get Shit Done!”
New Feature Development: 7/2016
Once the platform MVP framework was in place, it was time to start integrating new business service workflows into the platform. One challenge was designed in an old UI kit. I knew I had to modernize the platform to help BitTitan serve as a trusting SaaS application. I started visually exploring new designs and hired a few rock-star UX designers, while we also turned our attention to designing new features such as Dashboard, Service center, Device management, OEM services, and Activity center. The product machine was in high-performance mode using remote development shipping features in 2-3-week sprints.
Alpha Platform (Customer Onboarding): 1/2016
After multiple requirement meetings, presentations, and wireframes, we shipped the Alpha platform UI, building the minimal feature requirements to meet an MVE. At the same time, I supported a host of new services being developed on the old platform. The system had to scale for new services while App-Switching (drop-menu) into MigrationWiz, Sales Automation, Deployment Pro, Data Encryption, SSO/Registration, User Management, App Launcher, Purchasing, and innovating new Cloud Services.
The Big Picture (Discovery): 10/2015
A lot of research went into understanding the new business direction. BitTitan’s flagship product MigrationWiz (MW) had six-plus years of technology behind it, including multiple types of Migration services, Shopping Cart, Licensing, Support, SSO/rBac, and Account Management. It would be too risky for the company to build on the current MW platform to avoid service disruptions.
The Process:
The decision was made to create a new platform from scratch, use the latest framework (ember.js), but still be on a cloud platform (Azure). The wireframe below shows the initial breakdown of how the two platforms could co-exist as features need to be migrated or re-architected to the new platform. We needed hooks to other systems using Federated SSO while being Hippo compliant. This was a data migration platform that migrates Fortune 500 companies. Customers wanted to reduce costs by switching cloud providers seamlessly.
The Business Pivot
The CEO made a business decision to leverage MigrationWiz (cash cow + partner base) and pivot the company to Managed Service Provider (MSP). This was perfect for enterprise customers needing a way to migrate legacy data to the cloud to be on a modern tech stack (AWS, Google, Azure, etc.)
The Collaboration – CEO
The CEO had a clear vision of the business and understood the landscape of On-Premise computers will be phased out, and the future would be cloud computing and AI. I didn’t have the technical background, and he knew that. So he took the time, and we were locked in a room for two weeks with the designers, and we mapped out the entire vision for the platform. We presented the vision to the dev team with InVision prototypes and gave the dev team a review. Then, they started to disagree and commit.
The Collaboration
UX design was embedded in the development team. I asked the CEO if we could buy a large-format printer to print out the experiences based on the dev sprint the team was on. We were shipping features every month. I took this picture when the developers collaborated on the floor on how best to solve the development challenge. It was incredible that we were shipping features every month.
MigrationWiz: UX/UI Refactor
My solution is redesigning the task management workflow to be a vertical list on the left navigation rail to track completed steps. This has been highly successful, reducing the number of support tickets and increasing customer confidence in achieving a migration. The introduction of the left navigation for task management provided the baseline for future workflows for MSP Complete.
The Platform – Discovery
The original MigrationWiz functionality was a wizard-type UI model. The amount of customer confusion and support tickets was a real pain point for customer support. The platform served well (initially) as an email migration service. However, the UI model was never expected to scale beyond that as the business grew. The UX started to break down when new features were bolted on. I was the Team of One (UX designer), employee #36, responsible for re-architecting and modernizing the migration workflow experiences.
The Beginning
When I joined the company, the original MigrationWiz platform looked amateur and was built on a dated tech stack, which slowed innovation. The business decided to redesign the tech stack using a more modern framework.
