(2005)
My role: Interface Consultant and Designer, Illustrator
PolyServe Matrix Server consolidates servers and storage into high-availability and scalable utility grids. Managing such a complex task requires complex user interfaces, and the Matrix Server GUI (a Java-powered desktop app) had grown organically over several years. No graphic designers or interface designers had yet been engaged to unify the GUI’s daunting facade. Individual developers had designed the pieces of the interface necessary to complete their own small parts of the larger interface.
Screen Audit and Interface Enhancements
Matrix Server’s organic growth had produced a GUI that relied heavily on the metaphor of batch processing, accomplished through a thicket of dialog boxes (more than 100 altogether). I audited every screen of the interface, standardizing non-standard stuff. Then I consolidated several screens into a browser-like information display, subtly shifting the product to a real-time user experience metaphor.
Icons
The software managed a variety of objects on the grid: servers, services, monitors, notifiers, disks, volumes...all told, there were more than 100 individual icons, designed by dozens of developers. The result was a quiet riot of visual styles, often graphically unsophisticated. The original icons were functional, but a little dated, and lacked visual coherence.
In tandem with my interface overhaul, I devised a unified visual language: identifying server objects (“nouns”), actions that can be performed on those objects (“verbs”), and states in which those objects can exist (“modifiers”). My goal was not to make icons speak a language of completeness (“this 16 pixel wide icon tells me all possible information about a particular server”), but rather a language of urgency and expediency (“this 16 pixel wide icon tells me I need to learn more about a particular server”).
Finally, I had a wonderful kind of zen experience, as an illustrator, drawing hundreds of teeny tiny icons. I had never drawn so many things at such an impoverished resolution, and it was weirdly liberating. Pixel bonsai.
