Zoe Monosson

I focused on a particular portion of the installer, when the user assigns roles to various nodes. A node is a server component that has various features such as memory, RAM, and central processing units (CPU). My main objective was to conserve space on the screen so that I could place all information on one page. By information, I mean as many nodes and their subsequent attributes. I started by familiarizing myself with the old system in order to see what aspects of the design Red Hat wanted me to keep. This also helped me to identify the constraints of the current design. After, I began the design, sketching and brainstorming processes. My first challenge was how to organize the most important information about each node.

After collaborating with my supervisor, I decided to expand upon the idea of having a panel for each node that would open and close. I focused on the information architecture of each panel and questioned: which information was most important in node role assignment and how can I convey that information quickly. I played with changing the colors and sizes of text and images. As well, l created symbols that would indicate whether there was a large or small amount of an attribute instead of displaying a number.

After brainstorming how each node panel would look, I sketched how the whole screen would look in order to gauge if the screen would look too cluttered. I sketched out full screens for both panels that would open up horizontally and vertically.

After collaborating with my supervisor, I found out that the key piece of information in node role assignment was how many "free nodes" each node had. At this point, I switched from sketching to designing on Sketch and started iterating through designs that highlighted the amount of "free nodes" in each node.

These are images from my initial wireframe brainstorm. I experimented with different ways of presenting the data clearly while minimizing the physical space.

The next step in the design process was to test the concept of collapsible panels. This image was used to check if the user would be able to see all present nodes on one page.

One challenge with the collapsible panels design was that once a panel was closed, the user did not know if a role had been assigned to that node or not. This iteration was created to show the user, which roles had been assigned already whether the panel was open or not. The theory behind this design was that there would be a specific color associated with each node role. When a role was assigned to a node, the associated role color would appear on the node's panel.

While the problems with the collapsible panels seemed to be solved, my supervisor and I realized that all node panels could fit on a single screen without the collapsible utility. Therefore, for the final design, I decided to show the attributes for each node all the times-- no collapsible utility needed. I made this design choice in order to create a simpler design.

This design was also applied to the use case where there are five different kinds of node roles, not just four.