Splunk develops software that allows IT professionals to search, monitor, and analyze machine-generated big data for various purposes. While at Splunk, I hired and mentored a design intern to develop a UI taxonomy and standards. In addition to working on a complete redesign of Splunk and various other projects like Dashboards and an App Framework, I developed and delivered Use Case training to product managers and engineers, and conducted usability studies with internal users and customers and presented findings and proposed solutions to the team.
This project was a complete redesign of the Splunk application to improve performance and reporting capabilities and to transform it from a tool into a software platform with a scalable App framework.
For the redesign, I worked very closely with the Creative Director, Product Management, and Engineering to define the product scope and develop and evaluate designs.
I spent a lot of time working with internal users and SMEs to identify the personas and use cases to ensure the framework and design would accommodate real-life workflows. The new, scalable platform initially yielded a dozen or so internal apps and has grown now to almost 500, mostly contributed by users.
While at Yahoo! I observed a number of usability studies conducted by the Search team. They were looking for ways to help users increase the accuracy of their search. While that project wasn’t viable for the general population, I saw the need for that kind of support in Splunk, since the search language was proprietary and had to be learned. I pitched the idea to provide help to users while searching (in addition to advanced typeahead, including examples, definitions, and other related suggested searches) and was able to work with their Chief Engineer to develop the concept and test it internally. The feature was released into the product and still exists today!