I handled UI design for several products at FireScope,
focusing primarily on the Orchestrate (CMDB) product. My
work spanned web, mobile, desktop, and touch-screen
applications. My work on the Orchestrate product was
referred to by industry analysts as 'the easiest-to-use
CMDB ever.'
I also spearheaded the mobile initiative, designing 8
mobile apps, including the first mobile CMDB application.
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Real Artists Ship.
You don’t always have the benefit of a blank slate and an
exclusive focus on quality. At FireScope, we had already
acquired a CMDB product from another company by the
time I started on it. The original acquisition was clearly
not designed with a focus on usability or user-friendliness.
A team of programmers and I worked for 6 months, transforming
an old-school web application written by student
programmers into a sleek, Ajax driven browser application
to hit our launch date.
Throughout the entire life of the project, I was the primary
programmer and sole UI designer.
Information is Beautiful.
Confifiguration Management Databases have to
deal with a large amount of information from very
disparate data sources. Coming up with elegant
ways to handle and make sense of this information
is a complex and neverending challenge. I made
the decision early on that, while our competitors
may leave data crunching to the realm of APIs and
consultant programmers, FireScope Orchestrate
would take a very visual approach to data
manipulation. Heavy use of visual information
design, live previews, and guided processes
helped make Orchestrate one of the few CMDBs
in the world that could be up and running in hours
instead of days.
High Performance
Multitasking.
While Orchestrate occupied a
large part of my focus at FireScope,
I was also responsible for UI Design for the rest
of the product suite as well, including business
service management (BSM) and anlytics suites.
BSM was much more established when I arrived
at FireScope, so taking a radical redesign approach
wasn’t going to be possible. Instead, I focused on
making small UI Improvements as both time and
practicality permitted.
The Analytics Suite was a desktop client. I was
asked to help develop an intuitive drag and drop
interface. I delivered a complete concept within
5 days, and assisted the Java developers with
implementing it in time for a trade show.
First of a Kind.
I oversaw the design and development of the first mobile CMDB
application ever. Designed for the iPhone, Android, and later the
iPad. I finished the original iPhone application in one week. I
finished the iPad port in one night.
Taking on Mobile Enterprise.
One of the primary functions of a CMDB is handling and approval
of Requests for Change. In a large enterprise, there can be dozens
of these per day, and even critical operations cannot be performed
without RFC approval. This puts an enormous burden on those
tasked with approving them, as even short term unavailability can
have dire consequences. Orchestrate Mobile freed IT Operations
Managers by allowing them to review and approve RFCs from the
road or airport. Several customers bought the product just for that.
There’s no ‘i’ in Team.
While I provided programming on early builds of the mobile apps,
most of the actual development was done by outside contractors.
This meant defining the specification in a way that largely non-
visual programmers could easily work with. In addition to cutting
artwork assets, I provided detailed, annotated visual specifications,
complete communications format documents, and visual storyboards to
alleviate confusion.
Due to the ease of communication between design and dev, we
were able to deliver pixel-perfect applications in days instead
of months. All totaled, I oversaw the development of 8 mobile
apps, including 3 iPhone apps, 3 iPad apps, and 2 Android apps.