Dell Technologies
– Live Optics
Designed, grew, and marketed an enterprise IT analytics web application platform for Dell Technologies for over 7 years.
I worked on Live Optics for Dell for over 7 years, first as a contractor at an agency while working on other projects, then at Dell as the UX Design and Product Marketing Team Lead for 2.5 years in a startup-style group within the company.
Live Optics is free, industry-standard software used to collect, visualize, and share data about IT infrastructure. It is essentially a donation to the IT industry by Dell, funded alongside Microsoft, Intel, Broadcom, and others to promote transparency in IT requirements gathering.
I took the barebones legacy Win32 app and created a cloud-based web app that grew into a full software suite.
- Led and mentored two designers while owning UX, visual design, information architecture, brand standards, and marketing
- Planned and designed new functionality, using research and analytics to continually evaluate and improve existing UX
- Built and maintained a design language system and ran visual QA after development
- Oversaw user research: surveys, testing scripts, testing strategy, and analytics interpretation
- Communicated UX principles and patterns to leadership, engineering, and product managers
- Created digital and print marketing assets, presentations, and conceptual designs for potential investors
- Acted at times as project manager, writing specs and user stories for designers and developers
Live Optics is used by over 200,000 people globally to gain insight into server environments. It helps IT administrators and service providers monitor system health, spot bottlenecks, and plan upgrades, turning complex data into clear, actionable visualizations.
It scales from a single laptop to an entire datacenter to virtual environments with tens of thousands of machines, showing high-level aggregates while letting users drill down to individual nodes. Presenting to Dell sales groups across the country, I was often told, “I couldn't do my job without Live Optics.”