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Project: Backup for Smaller MongoDB Instances

Problem & Context

Business Goal
Create feature parity between recently acquired mLab offerings and MongoDB’s current Atlas offerings

Unmet Need
User needs to be able to have backup enabled on their smaller MongoDB instance sizes

Design Studio

Typically in my process, I start most of my work pen-to-paper. Below is some examples of things I was thinking about as I kicked off this project.

I did this in preparation for a design kick-off and studio I was holding with all the key stakeholders and contributors to this project. A design studio is an efficient and collaborative way to gather all the stakeholders into a room and have them sketch, present, and critique each other’s ideas. The outcome of my design studio was to help shape the user stories, uncover challenges that may exist in the experience and help the team to align on scope of the project.

Collaborative User Journey Mapping

There are generally 5 users who would enter this flow and one thing I emphasized in this part of the process is how they would feel in this configuration in comparison to the rest of the features in our product.

Specifically I thought about:
How will this feature co-exist with other features?
How will a user feel about the differences between this feature and other features?
Will they have the tools and information necessary to understand the differences?

Screen Shot 2019-04-02 at 7.05.55 PM.png — (Yes I admit, not the most beautiful)
I use Google Docs to simply outline the user needs in a box and I ask people who are closer to our customer base to review the user journeys to validate I have captured all the edge cases possible.

Design Work

Among balancing changing requirements and exploring ways to maximize the experience for this feature. I explored a few different parts of the user journey and how their experience differs from the current experience.

Screen Shot 2019-04-02 at 7.11.07 PM.png

Since this feature is also a pared down version of an already existing feature, I also spent time calling out the changes to be made to the interface for the engineering team working on the project and spent time in a group setting explaining the rationale behind these changes.