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Cloud & InfrastructureWeb Application

HPE Storage Platform

Duration

14 months

Role

Senior UI/UX Designer

Team

5 Designers, 20+ Engineers

Tools
FigmaHPE Design SystemUsability Hub

Project Overview

Enterprise storage management software for server administration, cloud provisioning, and real-time performance monitoring.

Business Background

HPE needed to modernize its legacy infrastructure management tools to compete with cloud-native offerings from AWS and Azure.

The Problem

IT administrators faced steep learning curves, fragmented workflows for cloud provisioning, and difficult-to-parse performance metrics.

Objectives

  • Modernize the legacy UI to align with the new HPE GreenLake brand
  • Simplify the storage provisioning workflow
  • Improve observability of system health

Success Metrics

  • ↑ 20% user adoption of new platform features
  • ↓ 30% time spent on onboarding new administrators
  • ↓ 40% reduction in configuration errors

The Challenge

Balancing the deep technical requirements of infrastructure engineers with the need for a simplified, modern user experience.

1.Extremely complex domain knowledge required to understand user tasks
2.Strict adherence to the overarching HPE design system while inventing new patterns for storage
3.Visualizing petabytes of data usage intuitively

Discovery & Research

Kickoff & Audit

Embedded with the storage engineering team to understand the technical constraints of SAN, NAS, and Object storage provisioning.

Audited the legacy HPE 3PAR and Nimble storage management consoles.

Key Pain Points

  • Provisioning a new storage volume took 15 steps across 4 different screens.
  • Performance bottlenecks were difficult to diagnose due to poor charting.
  • Terminology was inconsistent across different storage product lines.

Opportunities

  • Implement a wizard-based approach for complex provisioning tasks.
  • Standardize terminology across the hybrid cloud portfolio.
  • Use machine learning insights to predict storage capacity exhaustion.

Research Methodology

Remote contextual inquiry and task analysis with 12 IT administrators.

Key Insights:

Admins rely heavily on topology maps to understand physical vs. logical storage.
Error messages in the legacy system were unhelpful (e.g., "Error 504") rather than actionable.
Capacity planning is a major anxiety point for admins.

Personas & Journey

Robert, Storage Administrator

IT Pro

Goals

  • • Ensure 99.999% uptime
  • • Provision storage quickly for dev teams

Behaviors

Highly technical, prefers CLI but uses GUI for high-level monitoring.

User Journey Shift

Before

Receive Jira ticket -> Open CLI or legacy GUI -> Navigate through 5 tabs -> Execute command -> Manually verify.

After

Receive Jira ticket -> Open new portal -> Use 3-step provisioning wizard -> System auto-verifies.

Design Execution

UI Exploration

Typography: Metric (HPE Brand Font) for all UI elements.

Colors: HPE GreenLake palette (Dark mode optimized with distinctive Green/Teal branding).

Design System Components

Wizard FlowsTopology NodesResource Capacity BarsData Grids

Final Design Execution

A high-fidelity look at the final polished interfaces, components, and key interactions that were successfully handed off to engineering.

Final Design Mockups

Final Outcome & Impact

The new platform modernized HPE’s storage management, making it competitive with cloud-native UX standards and significantly improving IT admin productivity.

↑ 20%
user adoption
↓ 30%
onboarding time
↓ 40%
user errors during provisioning

Key Learnings

  • •Learning complex storage networking concepts quickly to design effectively.
  • •Designing for edge cases where hardware fails catastrophically.

Future Improvements

  • •Integrate generative AI to suggest optimal storage tiering based on usage patterns.