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CLOUD ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT DASHBOARD

Simplifying Management of Internal Cloud Hosting Accounts

This project was one of the major developments within GE Corporate’s cloud hosting website called MyHosting. Its main purpose was to streamline the process for individuals in other GE business units to take actions on GE Hosting cloud accounts they own, such as decommissioning accounts, adding other owners, or managing automation. Through collaboration with software engineers and validation via usability testing, this project resulted in the simplification and streamlining of such tasks.

The problem:
How can we expedite the process of handling owned cloud hosting accounts?
My Role:

  • UI/UX Designer

  • Testing Coordinator

The Team:

  • UX Designer

  • Front End Engineer

  • Product Manager

Tools Used:

  • Axure

  • Figma

  • Microsoft Teams

My Contributions:

  • Design of  UI and UX

  • Prototyping/Wireframing

  • Usability Testing

The Process:

​Empathize

  • Customer interviews, feedback gathering from Product Manager

  • Identify customer goals/tasks

Specify

  • Speficy persona(s) of focus

  • Prioritize features and workflows

​Ideate

  • Sketches

  • Low-fidelity mockups

  • Multiple versions of task UI

Bring to Life

  • Axure wireframe

  • Figma prototype

  • Direct work with front-end engineer

​Verify

  • Usability Testing

  • Additional feedback gathering

Outcomes:

  • Reduced turnaround time for software management requests

    • Shortened from multiple days to hours​

  • Reduced workload for multiple software teams

    • Software delivery teams​

    • Teams who own accounts

RESEARCHING OUR USERS

Due to our limited user base and the organization's priority of expediency in delivery, preliminary feedback was gathered by my team's project manager. 

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Additionally, I decided to interview a handful of users who fit our main personas:

  • Cloud Account Owners

  • Software Delivery Team Members

  • Cloud Product Developers

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For these interviews, I wanted to find out a few key points of information:

  • What actions are primarily taken with owned accounts

  • The existing process for lookups and actions

  • Most relevant information for account lookup

  • Main issues involved with existing processes

COMPLEX ACCOUNTS, COMPLICATED ISSUES

Owners of Cloud Hosting accounts on AWS and Azure faced multiple roadblocks:

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  • Having to contact Delivery Teams to decommission accounts and add owners 

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  • Needing to visit a separate website such as AWS or Microsoft Azure to view their accounts’ security control policies

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  • Lack of control of the automated elements of their accounts, such as bots

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  • Inability to access their accounts' change logs, which prevented team members from being up to speed

These roadblocks had multiple negative impacts on several teams:

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  • Turnaround time was significantly high, ranging from hours to days

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  • Decentralized notification caused an increased workload on multiple teams and increased the potential for errors in communication and delays in updates.

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  • In cases where accounts had multiple owners, delays could result in confusion about the fulfillment of requests.

SIMPLIFYING AND STREAMLINING

Based on the above points, I decided to focus on the Cloud Hosting Account Owners.

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Ultimately, the users' goals included five safe, low-risk actions:

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  • Toggle automated elements such as bots

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  • View security control policies and copy them

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  • Change the account’s owners or add new ones

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  • View change logs of existing accounts

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  • Decommission the accounts in a safe, stable manner that audits the user

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Users often also had multiple accounts and, in some cases, dozens. To address this, more functions were needed:

  • View multiple accounts in a table format

  • Filter and sort through accounts

  • Search for specific accounts

decom.png

As work on low-fidelity iterations began, a few conflicting issues were found:

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  • Users did not want a separate “details” page for performing actions

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  • The accounts didn’t have enough information for such pages

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  • We needed to fit the action buttons on the table somehow.

After some iterations, my team agreed on two solutions in tandem: 

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  • Shift the table layout to view the action buttons

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  • House the actions on modal pop-ups

This provided a number of advantages for the end users:

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  • Simplifying the tasks by not needing to navigate to a new page

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  • Maintaining a compact view while still viewing information and actions

REFINING ACTIONS

In many cases, I worked to decide the best avenue of design for certain actions:

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  • Creating multiple prototype versions of action modals.

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  • Performing A/B tests with a handful of team members.

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  • Showing both versions to some stakeholders and discussing which to pursue.

OUTCOMES

Shortly after the rollout of this feature began, we received multiple points of feedback:

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  • Reduced turnaround time, with some updates reflecting in the UI as soon as minutes later.

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  • Increased ease of tasks, such as no longer needing to visit external sites.

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  • Overall satisfaction with the new workflow.

VERIFYING DESIGNS AND FINDING SHORTCOMINGS

Wanting to validate our UI design choices, I decided to perform a handful of usability tests.

 

Our procedure for these usability tests was the following:

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  • Lay out a set of tasks for users to perform

    • Filter out some accounts

    • Toggle a bot on a specific account

    • View a specific security control policy on that account 

    • Replace one of the account's owners with themselves.

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  • Start them on a stage environment version of the dashboard with hard-coded table items.

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  • Ask each task one at a time, encouraging them to think aloud

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  • Document their thoughts

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After getting a small sample size, we managed to find some major points of improvement:

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  • The ability to shift the table row and reveal actions was not always clear

    • Having a clickable caret on the side may not always be visible (including one user with a damaged screen)

    • Some users suggested a natively clickable row

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  • Some buttons did not have clear wording

    • The filter button was not evident in how it indicated whether a filter was up

    • "Change owners" potentially not implying the ability to add owners

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  • In the case of the SCP modal, the function to copy the code was to click it

    • However, it did not have a dedicated button for copying.

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Our solutions were to do the following:

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  • Change the wording on the "Change owners" button to "Edit owners"

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  • Make the rows natively clickable and remove the caret

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  • Add a dedicated copy button and notification for copying text in the SCP.

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You can view the newest Axure prototype at the link below. If there is a password, please email me, as the password may have changed.

© 2018-2025 Antonio Diaz. All rights reserved.

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