Rackspace SLA Price Calculator - LUPING YEH

Overview

This was a 125 hours Capstone project while I was at School of Information, University of Texas at Austin. The goal of this project was to revamp Rackspace’s SLA (Service Level Agreement) calculation system, which allowed existing customers to understand the price variations with different services as well as providing account managers a holistic view to communicate mutual benefit and to facilitate the decision making process.

Process

I was the Interaction Design Intern of this project, who was responsible for the 1st design iteration, utilizing stakeholders’ feedbacks, then validating the idea with the usability study.

I. Discover

Initial stakeholder meeting and requirement gathering
Heuristic evaluation for existing system
Competitor Analysis

II. Define

Defined design principle based on heuristic evaluation and competitor analysis

III. Design

Exploring the design ideas
Low-fi wireframing
Internal review and design iterations
Low-fi prototyping

IV. Validate

Usability test

Reflection

There were two challenges while I was working on this Capstone project, time limitation and remote usability test.

Time is always tricky, as an Interaction Design Intern, juggling between school courses and Capstone projects and I only had 125 hours to complete the 1st design iteration. Fortunately, I had my scheduled planned before the project started so I was able to track each phases even with the intensive schedule.

While one round of usability testing is better than no testing at all, remote usability testing is one way to do just that. There were 12 participants recruited within the Rackspace and complete the test distributed by internal email. It’s challenging without talking directly to participants and watching they interact with the prototype. In conclusion, the overall score was positive and there were also feedbacks that could drive the next design iteration.