Designing the Future of Complex Training and Simulation
Aerospace
The Ask
Qumulo, the leader in universal-scale file storage, needed a website that showcased their market differentiation and increased lead generation for their sales team. As the company was advancing their positioning from one that was associated with an appliance-based offering to a brand centered on a software fabric that spanned the on-premises data center and the public cloud, they needed a site that was robust enough to support the complexity of guiding users through a friction-free, learn and try buying journey of a software centric offering. Qumulo also needed a web platform that was extensible enough to evolve with their business growth and was accessible enough for their broader team to easily design and deploy content on an ongoing basis.
Scaling is automated and assets are served via a content delivery network to minimize hosting costs, without reducing performance. The workflow allows for continuous integration of new code and transparent replication across environments.
The Actualization
As speed-to-market was key, we took an atomic design approach. Atomic design provided the appropriate level of abstraction needed to enable conversations about design intent, without the need to make immediate decisions about design or development implementation. Rather than creating a collection of web pages, we designed a system composed of components. Once the components were created, they could be arranged in any number of ways with drastically different outcomes. This began with the creation of Atoms, the smallest elements, i.e. a button. From there, we assembled the Atoms into Molecules, such as a search field or search button. Then, the Molecules are combined together to form large Organisms, such as a navigation bar.
We established a rules-based design language system that became the building blocks for our developers to build the custom content management system (CMS). The rules and design guidelines included: colors, typography, spacing, image treatments, illustration styles, icon styles, buttons, page components, page controls, page layouts, etc. This culminated in into a design system and accompanying pattern library, which not only included the rules and examples stated above, but was the main repository of the component code. This led to the ability to have a change in the design system be immediately reflected on the website, as the CMS pulls directly from the style guide.
The established infrastructure, design language system, and adaptable and modular CMS empowered any member of the Qumulo team to create, adapt, and distribute content on demand, retiring an outdated, gated system that did not allow for collaborative and efficient workflows. The new system allowed for Qumulo’s team to create pages that were well-designed without the need of a design team having to design any pages, as employees are able to take any component and create any type of page imaginable within the design language. The ease of content deployment, coupled with Qumulo’s ability to create various forms of sales communications at a moment’s notice, has resulted in an increase of lead generation, bolstering the company’s ability to provide their customers with a modern storage solution.
