Carbonite

Improving the Restore Flow

The problem

As described previously, there were several areas of terrible UX throughout the Carbonite product line. Perhaps the worst was the “Restore Flow” in the consumer product. That is, the way customers could get back files they had backed up to the cloud. This was a critical part of the experience, because it represented the entire value proposition of the product — the whole reason you are paying for backup is to get a file back when you need it. Additionally, due to the nature of lost files, customers were often frantic and stressed as they tried to recover something important, not at all the mindset needed to battle through the existing, complex workflow.

This wasn’t just a UX assessment. Articles about restoring were the most-searched and most-read articles in our knowledge base, and help with restoring files drove the majority of support calls, a costly metric to the business.

So we set out to see what we could do to improve the UX of this critical area of the product.

The project

Though these issues were already well-documented, we started with some focused research to understand even more deeply. We partnered with customer support to hear their takeaways from support calls about restoring, we listened to samples of support calls, and we did moderated sessions with customers where they walked us through a prototype of the existing flow to see firsthand where they stumbled or got confused.

The message was clear — the process was too long, too complicated, and had too many options. In particular, the flow had several complex sections that supported relatively uncommon edge cases, but were presented to all users, unnecessarily complicating most journeys.

With that, we went into a design phase, where I worked with the designer for the Desktop product to create a new version of this flow that was as simple and easy as possible, with helpful guidance and clear context presented throughout.

The results

The redesign was a huge success. We reduced the restore flow for the most common use cases from 8 steps down to as few as 2. We also used this opportunity to develop the cohesive, company-wide UX design system, a new look and feel for the product line that was a huge improvement.

After the new version was released, we saw an increase in Customer Satisfaction from users who had restored files (a number that was abysmally low previously). There was a notable reduction in Support Calls about restoring files, and the ones that did still happen were faster and easier, in both cases saving that part of the business a lot of money.

Note: While I was closely involved in directing and shaping the overall project and each individual design, I didn’t actually create them. They are all the work of the fantastic designer I was working with on my team.