Explore: A Central Repository for Cloud Platform Assets

Recommendation Based UX: Projects

Overview

My Role: UX Lead
The Problem: As users created many assets across the company's diverse cloud services, they lacked a single, unified place to manage them. They needed more than just a file list; they required a powerful interface to browse, search, and organize content, while also handling complex tasks like managing permissions, supporting software development lifecycle (SDLC) activities, and analyzing dependencies between assets. Different tools and products had different mechanisms to organize content and there was a need to provide a unified experience that allows organizing assets across the various products and supporting different use-cases and flows
The Solution: I led the user experience design for "Explore," a comprehensive, drive-like feature integrated across the entire cloud platform. Explore provided a central repository for all user-generated assets, combining familiar file management paradigms with powerful, domain-specific capabilities for access control, SDLC workflows, and dependency analysis, creating a single source of truth for all user content.

Strategic Goals: Our primary objective was to create a robust and intuitive central hub for all user assets. We aimed to:
Establish a single, consistent interface for browsing, searching, and organizing all content on the platform.
Seamlessly integrate advanced, technical features like access control, SDLC management, and dependency analysis into the core user experience.
Simplify complex workflows and improve user efficiency when managing large-scale projects.
Ensure the experience was scalable to support a growing number of assets and services.
Allow users to browse their assets by different dimensions and organizing mechanisms, depending on the user's needs.
My Core Responsibilities:
UX Leadership: I led the overall user experience design for the Explore feature, managing and mentoring a team of three interaction designers and one visual designer.
Information Architecture & Interaction Design: I defined the core information architecture and the primary interaction patterns for all aspects of the feature, from basic file organization to complex workflow management.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: I worked closely with product management and engineering leads to translate complex technical requirements into an intuitive and coherent user experience.

Discovery & Conceptualization:

Review and analysis of the existing “content management” experiences across the company, different tools, both Cloud and on-prem.
Interviewing stakeholders to map out existing user journeys for SDLC and dependency analysis.
Requirements gathering and analysis of different permissions models and RBAC.

Design & Iteration:

I guided the team in creating lo-fi wireframes and prototypes for core flows like browsing, search, and assets organization.
Refined designs and extended them to cover more use-cases, including permissions settings, asset bundles (packaged content) creation and management, tagging and more.
Worked with visual design to provide high-fidelity and detailed designs.

Collaboration & Refinement:

Held design reviews with stakeholders from multiple product teams to ensure the solution met their specific needs.
Partnered with engineering to ensure the technical feasibility and faithful implementation of the designs.

The "Explore" feature was successfully launched and became the standard for all asset management across the company's cloud platform.
It provided a unified and consistent experience for all users, dramatically simplifying complex workflows and creating a single source of truth for all project assets.
The flexible architecture allowed new services and asset types to be seamlessly integrated as the platform continued to grow.