Greylock approached us with a clear goal: to create a tool that would enable users to research and identify investment opportunities in the cloud industry by leveraging various data points, including market share between the top three providers (Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure), volume of VC investment, and an extensive database of cloud services.
Our team worked closely with Greylock to understand their dataset and translate it into a useful research tool with data visualization and data tables. Overall, the tool has helped to provide users with valuable context and data to aid investment decisions or other investigations.
📐 Wireframing
🎨 Working with Visual Designer
Greylock has straightforward use cases, and its dataset is not too complex to work with. Starting with low-fi wireframes, I created the base structure and workflow, mapping out the user stories to ensure that it met all of Greylock's requirements. The wireframes were refined over a few more rounds with the client team until we reached an agreement on the information architecture, flow, and functionalities of each feature.
One thing I realized while working on this project is that using realistic data in the wireframes, even though it certainly took more production time than just using placeholder text, helped people role-play the target user and look at the design from their perspective, enabling them to give realistic reactions of what information they could extract from the charts or what actions they would want to perform on the data tables.
Mapping user stories to first-round wireframes.
Elaborating and developing wireframes through the next rounds.
During the Greylock project, one of the user stories I worked on is to visualize the market share of the Big Three cloud providers (GCP, AWS and Azure) in various market segments.
I came up with the idea of a sortable bar chart that not only displays the general market share but also allows users to see which segment is dominated by GCP, AWS, or Azure.
To test the idea's effectiveness, I quickly mocked-up a prototype. By using the chart function in Google Sheet, I was able to render four states of a bar chart from Greylock's actual data table. Then, with just a few more steps, I stitched the screenshots together in Figma and made it perform like a realistically coded product.
This embeded version is interactive, you can play it out!
This embeded version is interactive, you can play it out!
It was a fun experience testing the idea out with some internal members and see how they read and interpret the chart. Below are some responses that we collected:
“…Developer tools is the most active markets and can expect strong competition between Big 3…”
“…When sort by either of Big 3, I can understand what is the top performing market for the big 3…”
“…Basically I can understand that top 5 markets that already matured, all have significant shares between big 3, while top 5 from bottom up can tell me that Amazon's AWS is preferred among services/market currently in the early stage…”
“…I’m curious why Azure is obviously the dominant choice in ML service…”