Western Digital

In 2014, roughly 40 percent of all global digital content was stored on Western Digital hard disks. The Achilles' heel of this $20B hardware juggernaut was delivering great software experiences, and the gap grew more visible as competitors evolved from pure hardware players into design-led organizations like Google, Apple, and Amazon. WD's flagship My Cloud™ led the personal-cloud market, yet it competed against iCloud and Google Drive at a clear disadvantage. When I joined WD, the product my team was charged with redesigning still ran on the long-obsolete Flash/Macromedia platform. Francis Kim, who had been hired to revamp the UX organization, asked me to join forces with him, lead the interaction design team, and raise the bar on mobile design standards.

Navigating an Ocean of Hardware Limitations

In my first week, Eric B., head of the back-end engineering team, summarized the design challenge: "The problem is that My Cloud™ is essentially a Linux box powered by an ARM processor." He wanted to be sure that before my team committed to any design solution, he knew well in advance which new APIs had to be created. His team could not lean on the libraries and out-of-the-box APIs that Android developers typically use. Close collaboration became the critical success factor in redesigning the My Cloud™ software, a project codenamed Webfiles.

The design and technology partnership was excellent. During the discovery phase, hundreds of hand-drawn storyboards and diagrams mapped opportunities and potential pitfalls in the future solution. I also institutionalized a weekly design review where the design team received immediate feedback from the product and development teams. Two questions recurred in every meeting: Do we have the APIs to deliver this experience? If not, how soon can we have them?

The concept mapping of the sharing functionality is a good example of that collaboration. The first diagram showed the initial proposal, drawn without any design input, which allowed users to share anything from files to hard disk partitions. We used these sketches in meetings to show how confusingly similar and almost duplicative those five features would have become if we had built them as proposed. Thanks to Burlington W.'s bright, analytical design skills, the architecture team agreed to merge and simplify the solution into just three paths (see slide 8). When the project concluded, Raja Batra, head of the engineering organization, congratulated the design team for having "simplified the architecture." I took that as a great and sincere compliment, because design is not about pretty pictures. It is about achieving simplicity. As Steve Jobs used to say, design is about how something works, not just how it looks.

Testing, Testing, Testing…

In retrospect, another key to the successful redesign of WD My Cloud™ was hiring Raja J. from Microsoft as design research manager. With his help and two external researchers from UserZoom, my team ran at least one study every week. Raja eventually set up a physical usability lab, but the most impactful tests were the ones we launched via UserZoom; nothing matched its agility and versatility. Hard to believe now, but at the time, Linux jargon thoroughly permeated the product's customer-facing language. During onboarding, for example, users in a household were asked to set up "shares" (Linux partitions). It took a single research study to show that friendlier language, such as "set up your personal cloud," produced much better engagement and customer satisfaction scores.

Organizationally, the interaction design team became highly efficient through its streamlined use of research, prototyping tools like Framer, extensive reuse of design patterns, and its new design language. Anyone on the team could translate high-level business requirements into conceptual storyboards and deliver extremely accurate hi-fi comps to development without friction.

Another critical success factor was the acquisition of Trovebox, Jaisen Mathai's excellent digital photo sharing and management platform. Thanks to Jaisen and the phenomenal codebase we could suddenly leverage, we created beautiful, complex masonry layouts before the advent of CSS flexbox. Before Trovebox was sunset, its feature set, including the ability to connect multiple cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Box, and Amazon S3, was second to none. Working shoulder to shoulder with Jaisen was a privilege.

Ecosystem Design

While nurturing a vibrant culture of design-driven innovation, my team explored transforming the WD TV™ Media Player into My Cloud™ TV, an entertainment ecosystem that integrated a variety of existing WD products and services. Our vision was to tear down hardware silos so shared content could flow freely within a household. My Cloud™ drives would talk to a My Cloud™ TV dongle, which did not exist at the time, to transfer and render 4K movies at better quality than Netflix or Amazon. Every family member would back up their phone to their own private cloud, and some of those photos would appear on My Cloud™ TV as family memories. Android watches, the only wearable available at the time, would rate new content, announce the latest additions to the family's archive of memories, or simply serve as a remote control. The design strategy also included voice commands to search for content stored across multiple WD devices. My Cloud™ TV was short-lived and discontinued in 2016, but I ended up materializing some of those concepts at my next company, TiVo.

Conclusion

When UserZoom independently benchmarked the redesigned My Cloud™ interface, it proved to be the easiest to use, with a SUS score of 86, ahead of Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive (82, 78, and 74, respectively). When WD deployed Webfiles to the cloud, users for the first time enjoyed a top-notch, responsive web design that worked in every browser, on any device, in any orientation. My team worked on many other projects, such as Kuora, the software for the next-generation WD My Passport. Those contributions eventually helped all three iOS apps earn a 4-star rating for the first time in the company's history.