Google Apps Email Migration
Description
Project Date: Q2 2007 - Q3 2007
One of the major barriers to becoming an enterprise customer of Google Apps was email migration. Many potential large and medium sized customers already had an extensive infrastructure supporting their email system. This was both a reason to switch to Google Apps ("store it all in the cloud!") and a barrier ("how do we get there?!").
Email migration is a very complicated problem to solve, both technically and from a user experience perspective. The variety of IMAP flavors, migration options, and error conditions could easily overwhelm and required a careful analysis of the problem space. Status and error handling information are critical to admins because the process is complicated and it gives them a way to understand the migration process and make corrections if necessary.
This was an opportunity for UX to lead. I stressed the importance of Google doing the heavy lifting - gathering as much information as we could automatically and only asking when needed. I incorporated this philosophy into the new design and pushed the vision of what we could do. I built out a whole experience in wireframes and worked with UX researchers to conduct user labs. One participant commented that the new design was "utopia compared to the current system."
A complete set of wireframes [1.3 PDF] for the many steps and conditions in the migration process is available.
Role
Led the interaction design and information architecture through several iterations and user research; convinced the engineering team to do additional work in support of error handling and messaging; convinced the engineers of the importance of advanced auto-detection and smart defaults.