My project involved conceptualising and using Web 2.0 in the enterprise domain. The sponsor company is involved in producing software solutions used for managing large amounts of data. In recent times, new-age web concepts like social networking, sharing, and personalisation are being used in core enterprise software such as this. My project was an attempt to find whether such technologies can be used in Symantec products.

Data Centres have become very complex today, running 1000s of servers and application. This complexity has eventually led to reduced resource utilisation while at the same time increasing cost of management. Users are looking for solutions that can address this problem.

My role involved developing an interaction paradigm based on next generation web technology while looking at current challenges of data abstraction, scalability, and information, and visualization of data centre entities.

Some of the aspects for the project were: understanding the users, context of use; domain understanding; identifying different scenarios; generating new ideas and concepts, validating with domain experts and iterating to finalize a suitable design concept; prototyping; paper sketches; excel mockups, screen mockups and interactive screen mockups to stimulate actual user experience and documentation. The entire design process was used in the project. This included domain research, user study, conceptualisation, user interface design and user testing.

This was a research project, and I was given a lot of freedom to interpret and tackle it as I wished. I learnt a lot in terms of domain knowledge and process.