Summary
Syneto builds hyperconverged infrastructure with backup and disaster recovery built into the platform rather than bolted on. I led UX on the data protection and recovery products across new versions of Syneto’s management OS, used by more than 1,200 enterprise clients.
Recovery is the moment a storage product either justifies itself or doesn’t. The person using it is usually having the worst day of their quarter. That framing drove most of the design decisions here.
~30%
Reduction in recovery time
1,200+
Enterprise clients on the platform
~40%
Faster design-to-development handoff
NOTE:Draft pending Paul’s review. Figures are from his CV; the research narrative is the gap.
The problem
Recovery workflows were built one object at a time. An administrator restoring after an incident had to repeat the same sequence for every virtual machine or dataset, which is exactly the wrong ergonomics for a task performed under time pressure and scrutiny.
Alongside that, the product surface had grown across releases without a shared component vocabulary, so every new feature cost more to design and more to build than the one before it.
My role
Senior product and UX designer, owning the experience from discovery through implementation. I defined user journeys, wireframes, prototypes and UI components, ran research and usability testing, and worked directly with engineering and product to refine workflows.
I also facilitated the discovery workshops that shaped more than six new product features, carrying each from idea through the product lifecycle to implementation and testing, and built the design system the whole platform now runs on.
Design response
Bulk operations for recovery
Administrators were repeating identical single-object flows during incidents. Selecting and acting on many objects at once removed the repetition that made recovery slow.
Managed services surfaced in the product
Work that previously happened through support conversations became visible and actionable inside the interface.
A design system, not a style guide
Shared components and patterns cut design-to-development handoff time by roughly 40% and stopped every new feature from re-litigating basic interaction decisions.
Impact
Recovery time dropped by roughly 30% across the platform. The design system cut handoff time by around 40% and gave the team a stable base for the six-plus features that came out of the discovery workshops.
Personas, journey maps, wireframes and prototypes from this work fed directly into roadmap prioritisation, and usability testing reports gave the business quantifiable evidence for design investment.