Clumio Discover, one of the features of Clumio's enterprise SaaS backup product, was created to help prospective customers understand their current level of data protection, so that they would know what data to protect with Clumio. But our metrics showed that the feature was little-used and drove almost no business.
I oversaw a product designer and a visual designer on a project to re-imagine Discover in a way that would expand the sales pipeline and bring in revenue.
The previous version of Discover had a lot of useful information and visualizations. But the guidance provided was minimal, and there was so much data and so many ways of viewing it that users got lost.
I pushed the team to view the problem as more than redoing the Discover user interface, but instead to consider the entire experience, including how customers and prospects interact with our marketing materials, web site, sales team, etc.
Based on our analysis of the experience as a whole, we decided not to design a new web UI at all in the first release, but instead to create a Data Risk Assessment PDF as part of a white-glove experience for larger customers.
Doing the assessment via a PDF allowed our sales team to keep the conversation focused, and allowed prospects to easily share the results within their organization.
We chose to create visually-designed concept mockups rather than wireframes. This helped get the sales team excited about the new process, and served as a great conversation aid for potential partners.
The design approach we took for the PDF was data storytelling, where we called out specific areas of concern using a combination of text and data visualization.
As part of the data storytelling approach, we zeroed in on the top assets, accounts, and regions at risk, and included intelligent recommendations for how to address the issues we discovered.
Our designs were so compelling that not only did our sales force become excited about doing data risk assessments, AWS itself became interested in partnering with Clumio to do these assessments, even though AWS Backup was a competing product. Although Clumio was acquired when the production PDF was in beta, at the time of acquisition it was clear that the customer interest and value proposition for this feature was high and it had the potential to lead to a big increase in revenue.
