summer internship @ mongodb 2018
Problem & Context
MongoDB's Atlas initially launched the free tier due to massive user demand for a free offering of Atlas as a sandbox trial. Since then the free tier has grown to host 25000 clusters but there was no way to allow free users to upgrade to a paid tier. On the product side, this enables easy scalability for businesses and will reduce friction for users to upscale instances.
The organization of this project was a team of 3 engineers (interns), 1 lead engineer, and myself as lead designer. The relevant stakeholders included a project manager, Director of Product Design, VP of Engineering and the CTO.
User Mapping & Journey
It was integral to this project to understand who we were designing for. For example:
Experimentor Ed’s journey would look something like this:
Ideation & User Testing
The next step was to take time to understand the different access points to the upgrade cluster modal.
The most important access point to understand was the primary call to action on the home page of Atlas. In order to make a concisive design decision, I led a series of casual user tests where I interviewed different types of internal users of Atlas where I sought to understand the findability of two iterations of the upgrade button, beginning with giving them the opportunity to explain where they expected a button to be.
Essentially, there would be 6 main access points into the Upgrade Cluster Modal, including adding empty states to features not accessable to users in the free tier. For example:
Prototype
The final version was mocked up in an Invision and handed off to the team of engineers after the designs recieved approval from the CTO and VP of Engineering.