Manager of User Experience
at Carbonite
The company
Carbonite was the first cloud-backup software company. As such, they had a huge user-base for their B2C backup product, and had begun creating and acquiring software for a B2B side of the business that catered to SMB and Enterprise customers.
My role
I led the Product Design organization, reporting to the CPO. I led a team of around 15 people, including managers, designers of all levels, and a dedicated UX research team. As a team we owned the design of the entire Carbonite product line, which included the end-user software on Desktop and Mobile, an end-user facing web portal, an SMB web portal, and a very complex, server backup product for business. I also partnered with Marketing to co-own carbonite.com, with a designer focused on the user experience of visitors to the site.
Quick Reference
Customers
Fuze had two very different sets of customers. The original product was a B2C consumer backup product with over a million users fitting all sorts of different personas, though typically on the less technical-savvy end of the spectrum.
On the other hand, there was an SMB and Enterprise focused product line, driven by direct sales. Customers there were businesses of all size and their IT administrators, and in some cases other employees.
Products
Carbonite had several different products, and I oversaw work on all of them:
Consumer backup for Windows and Mac, as well as an associated Web Portal with more than a million users
A nascent Consumer mobile app
A robust administrative web portal for SMBs and Resellers
A server backup product for businesses
A hardware backup solution with it’s own UI
An email-focused backup product brought on via acquisition while I was there
Design Team
The design team was comprised of Product Designers of different levels, and a UX research team with a manager, researchers, and a Product Data Analyst.
Design System
Initially the products were wildly divergent, but as I undertook the project to unify their designs, we also developed a design system to help ensure quality and consistency between designers across a wide product line.
