Sharon Erlich - InfiniBox

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Overview and Challenges

As the lead designer at Infinidat for the past nine years, I’ve witnessed our evolution from a passionate startup of 80 employees to a leading enterprise in the storage industry with over 500 team members. My journey began with the InfiniBox GUI, the primary application for our InfiniBox storage management system. It was an exhilarating experience, filled with a continuous learning curve in enterprise storage fundamentals, tackling challenges related to offline environments and security constraints. Collaborating closely with the product team, I focused on optimizing user experience and streamlining complex storage management processes to ensure our system management app was intuitive and efficient.

Throughout the 4-year period (2016-2020), InfiniBox architecture had become much more complex, as had its features. During those years, I was fortunate to be part of Infinidat’s InfiniBox and its groundbreaking features, which played a major role in transforming Infinidat into an industry unicorn. These innovations helped position InfiniBox as a competitive enterprise-scale storage solution alongside global leaders such as IBM, DELL EMC, and NetApp. Below, I present the first generation of the InfiniBox GUI, developed during this period.

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Design approach and process

Focusing on user-centric design is crucial when discussing the IBox GUI. It embodies two key pillars. The first is the seamless user experience—ensuring the user journey is intuitive, efficient, and frictionless, even within the complexity of storage management systems. The second is the backend optimization, where the application works behind the scenes to simplify complex workflows, enhancing overall usability.

During the discovery and user research phase, we identified our key personas—storage and data center administrators. Collaborating closely with our early adopters allowed us to validate user needs and rapidly prototype the core features of the IBox GUI. The UI design was influenced by material design trends, featuring clean layouts, structured visual hierarchy, and bold typography. We prioritized consistency and scalability, leveraging reusable component libraries to ensure a cohesive, streamlined interface across the application

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Results

The IBox GUI has been highly regarded by enterprise customers, particularly those managing complex and large-scale data infrastructures. Leading global organizations, including financial institutions, healthcare providers, and IT service companies, have shared positive feedback on how the interface has significantly improved the management of their storage environments.

One of the most key experience reported by enterprise users is the ease of use the IBox GUI provides, even when dealing with complex storage management workflows. Tasks that previously required extensive manual effort and time were streamlined, allowing administrators to navigate through complicated data management processes more quickly and efficiently. The scalability of the IBox GUI allowed enterprise customers to handle an ever-growing amount of data seamlessly. The clear design language and consistent user experience helped users across different industries, reducing errors and ensuring smoother operations in mission-critical environments. Overall, the IBox GUI has been a game-changer for enterprise clients by making complex storage management faster, easier, and more efficient.