“There was a 30% reduction in support tickets in the first month after launch compared to the previous six months. Not bad.”

The Situation

The Mozy file retrieval process was difficult and unreliable. Through a customer satisfaction survey, we discovered that:

• Almost 45% of respondents considered the restore experience unsatisfactory
• Over 25% of respondents expressed extreme dissatisfaction
• There was a 7% increase in users who reported being extremely dissatisfied from Jan 2010 to Apr 2010

The Impact

• Lost revenue due to service cancellations. Almost 7% of users who had cancelled their subscription did so due to restore issues.*
• Increased costs due to additional support calls

^{*Based on 2010 YTD data}

“How might we improve the Mozy file restore experience to make it easier for users to access their data?”

Project Goals

1. Reduce abandonment rate
2. Reduce support costs
3. Increase user satisfaction

The Team

1. My role: Lead UX Designer
2. Product Manager
3. Dev Lead
4. Development Team

Research

Support Ticket Analysis

A support ticket analysis was done in 2010 to identify the top reasons customers called for support. They are:

• Help migrating restored data to new pc (25% of restore tickets)
• User doesn't know how to do the restores (10% of restore tickets)
• Not seeing a deleted file in web restore (10% of restore tickets)
• Note: There was a 5% increase in the number of users who did a restore because they wanted to access files remotely from another computer from Jan to Apr 2010

Scenario Development

Through our research we identified the primary scenarios we needed to address:

1. To perform a full restore to a new machine. Same Platform. Same OS.
2. Full restore to a new OS, private key
3. Secondary drive failure. Five failed files during restore (error messaging)
4. Perform a pick-and-choose DVD Media Restore. Media encrypted.
5. Restore to previous file versions
6. Remote access data retrieval

Design Principles

This solution combines user interface, system performance, and system automation. Following are a few design principles we wanted to emphasize for the project:

• Simplicity: Users will likely perform restores during distress, such as the loss of a machine or vital data. In addition, users do not typically conduct restores daily or even weekly. As a result, there is a general lack of familiarity with the restore process. We must create a solution to reduce complexity and walk users through the steps required to restore their data.
• Continuity: This solution is one of several key interfaces our customers use to backup and restore their data. The user experience should be consistent across each interface. Areas of consideration include branding, system behavior, messaging, and layout. All integration points with other Mozy interfaces/systems should be seamless – from a user perspective, this should look and feel like one service, not several.
• Accuracy: The restore process signifies much of Mozy’s customer value. Returning accurate data and setting proper expectations are critical to creating value. This feature should promote trust and confidence in the process. All selected files should be available to restore, the solution should communicate any problems to the customer, and progress/status should be timely and accurate.
• Speed: One of the most frequent complaints about uploads and downloads targets slow speeds. We must account for performance in our solution and allow customers to make essential decisions such as order and priority.

Process Development

The team collaborated to determine the most logical order of steps: start with the higher-level questions (which device?) and work down to the more specific ones (which file version?). We developed a model that reduced the steps needed for most scenarios, removing as much friction as possible for most users.

We brought the top scenarios together, refined and aligned to our new process diagram, and mapped each to our proto-personas.

Prototyping (low fidelity)

I built a prototype of the desired experience, using screenshots to show the progression of steps:

Deployment

I worked with developers to create the UX Design handoff to engineering.