In the past 2.5 years, I have owned the design of Citrix Director (XenDesktop’s Monitoring and Troubleshooting console) and have worked closely with the product managers, architects, development, engineering and the broader product design team. I have worked on multiple projects spanning across several XenDesktop releases.
My Role:
- Responsible for driving the product design from ideation to implementation, by collaborating with larger multi-disciplinary team. My day-to-day job function is to:
- Take stories (features) proposed by Product Managers (PM) and generate workflows/storyboards in collaboration with PMs and Architect (3-in-a-box process). This ensures the added feature fits the current product architecture and also helps in clarifying the scope and impacts of the project.
- Conduct user research to identify the true customer requirements, business needs and validation of the use cases.
- Convert the workflows into wireframes and getting buy-in from the engineering teams and stakeholders
- Work with the Information Experience (Ix) team to make sure the terminology, labels, messages and content is consistent across all Citrix products
- Work with the visual designer to generate necessary visuals and prototyping team to generate prototypes to clearly mark out specific interactions and flows.
- Hand off the artifacts to the engineering team and continuously support any product design requirements.
- Conduct UI reviews to assess implemented design which gives the opportunity to identify and fix issues before the product is released.
- Work with the product design standards team to generate design patterns and guidelines for Citrix products
- Collaborate with the User Research team in the entire research process from developing discussion guides, generating personas and scenarios, developing tasks, to conducting research sessions.
Some of the primary projects I have worked on include:
Licensing Alerts
To provide greater visibility into the licensing state of Citrix products so customers can assess and take actions on different licensing conditions. One of the key features of this design was the integration of licensing information and the delivery controller information in one single panel. The main idea behind this concept was to help admin look at the licensing alerts and try to drill down further in the information received from delivery controller in order to find the root cause of those alerts/issues.
Hosted Application Usage
To provide historical usage of hosted applications to Service Designers so that they can adjust the capacity of their Citrix delivery applications appropriately (licenses and sizing of the environment)
Searching capabilities for Machines, Users
As search is a primary and frequently performed task in Director, I made it a goal to make it very easy to search for users and machines. The search panel sits at the top level and was designed to be highly scalable keeping in mind future additions like multi-tenancy.
To view the entire list of projects (slated to release soon) please request a password here or email me at mukulc@gmail.com.
Alerts
Proactive Notifications and Alerting (One carousel)
The main goal of the feature is to notify administrators of potential problems in their environment so that they are assured that the health, performance and capacity of their environment is as expected. They are not expected to be in front of their consoles all the time so along with console alerts a mechanism of email and sms alerts was provided. Features to set thresholds for warnings and critical alerts was designed across various metrics (Number of Sessions, CPU, Memory, etc).
SCOM Integration
To provide administrators the ability to look into the performance and health of the physical and virtual infrastructure using Microsoft Systems Center Operation Manager (SCOM). The alerts from Microsoft SCOM will be integrated into the alerts from Director and will provide a comprehensive view of the entire environment.
Capacity Management
License Usage and Reporting
To allow administrators to monitor and report Citrix license usage to understand historical usage, adjust capacity and ‘true up’ as needed.
Machine Usage
To allow administrators real-time and historical view of the machines in the environment. Real-time to quickly assess capacity needs, health and status of machines and historical view to appropriately size the environment.
Desktop and Server OS Usage
To provide the historical usage of Citrix Desktops (Desktop OS Desktops and Server OS Desktops) so that administrators can adjust the capacity of their environment accordingly.
