freestyle orchestrator | vmware
About workspace one
WMware’s Workspace ONE is the industry leading device management platform. It enables organizations to manage devices across various business use cases from accessing work data on personal devices to managed laptops to line of business devices such as barcode scanners or POS systems. The platform enables organizations to setup these devices on behalf of their employees while ensuring they are compliant with all of the organization’s policies.
Project Overview
The Freestyle Orchestrator project focused on re-imagining how users interact with the Workspace ONE platform. The focus was to enable customers to easily setup and monitor their devices across various locations through a visualization tool. This would bring transparency to what is being sent to devices for more effective setup, troubleshooting, and feedback.
I led the Freestyle Orchestrator effort from the initial concept and discovery work through execution of the final tool released to customers. My focus was on architecting the overall tool and ensuring it was flexible to handle the various use-cases our customers have. Over the course of the project, I led two senior designers who were focused on the individual objects within the Workspace ONE system and how they would fit into the overall Freestyle Orchestrator tool.
The problem
The Workspace ONE platform is a versatile tool that can be used to manage devices across any business need and can be customized to each customer’s specific needs. While this is quite powerful functionality, it is not an easy process to setup the platform. Customers have to enroll devices into the system, then send assets to the such as apps or network configuration. Devices also require policies to ensure they have the correct security and privacy settings configured as well as making sure a device is compliant with an organization’s security standards. Each one of these things has to be configured and sent to devices one at a time, resulting in a very repetitive and complex setup process. There is little transparency into what has already be setup and sent to a device. Freestyle Orchestrator set out to solve this problem by creating a visual tool that would allow users to orchestrate and view workflows that will be sent to devices and monitor the performance.
The platform had disparate sections dedicated to each functionality set, but not way to see how they all fit together
Initial concept
Kicking off the effort, I collaborated closely with product and design leadership to align on the guiding vision to create a workflow visualization tool. As part of this phase I conducted discovery research into existing workflow tools, met with product partners to identify key use-cases, and worked with an architect to outline what a workflow would need when setting up a device.
Experiment inspired by scratch programming to use block shapes to indicate how they link together.
Initial concepts showing object relations.
Exploring how objects link together based off of logic criteria set by the user.
In these initial designs I explored how to convey workflows in a visual format from examining how objects in the system link together to the workflow building blocks to showing branching and links between steps in a flow.
Freestyle Vision
The explorations culminated in a document called the Freestyle Vision which featured a workflow visualization tool that surfaces insights to users and integrates with other products. It covered extensive use-cases from enabling users to create automation flows to surfacing insights into devices based on the configuration of a workflow. Through the course of this phase I partnered with product, design, and engineering stakeholders to craft a narrative for the “freestyle vision.” This document was used to socialize the concept with company leadership and align R&D verticals across product, engineering, and UX.
Initial design language for workflow blocks.
Showcasing the layout of the menu and canvas and how to inform users what to expect throughout the UI.
Highlighting the flow chart style builder branching capability and integration with other services.
Conditional statements could be created to determine how to handle scenarios such as risk detection.
Building the Freestyle Orchestrator
Once the product vision was socialized and company leadership aligned, it was time to start building the tool. It was called the Freestyle Orchestrator and I continued on as the lead designer on the project. During this phase I partnered with fellow designers, the product management team, and a dedicated engineering team to build and implement this net new tool. Some of the main design challenges I tackled were outlining the overall interaction hierarchy, defining a visual language that was in line with brand and existing design system, and providing easy onboarding as well as post workflow creation insights to users.
Base Hierarchy
I explored various layouts to determine how best to guide users through the UI. The UI would need to allow users to see the product they are in, set the name and initial settings for the workflow, add and arrange steps in a canvas area, allow users to configure settings and publish the workflow to devices.
Visual Language
As part of creating the interface of the workflow builder I had to define a visual language that could be used across the different views. This language would need to account for the various object types and be readable across the various states of an object.
Defining multiple views
Throughout this effort it was clear the Freestyle Orchestrator needed to support multiple ways for users to visually arrange their workflows. I identified two main ways of interacting with the workflow canvas: a flow chart view and a sequential list view.
Bring it all together
This demo shows how all of the pieces work together to allow users to create a workflow from start to finish. Take a look to see how the components can be orchestrated into a workflow using either the visual flowchart view or the listview.
Providing Insights
Once a workflow was created, users could publish them to the devices in their organization. As part of the Freestyle Orchestrator effort, we needed to provide insights to users on how their workflows were performing and surface any issues with a given step. To meet this goal, I led the direction on how to visualize a workflow performance and surface actionable information to users.
Launch & feedback
To showcase this new tool, VMware planned a preview during the keynote presentation of their annual conference called VMworld. I worked with company leadership to help craft the announcement and how the Freestyle Orchestrator would be introduced to customers. As part of the announcement, we held focus groups to demo detailed flows and gather customer feedback. Overall the reception of the tool was very positive with many customers requesting early access to the tool.
VMworld 2020 Keynote
The Freestyle Orchestrator was announced at the VMworld 2020 conference during the opening keynote! A session featuring an in-depth product walkthrough was also available to customers.
Follow Up at vmworld 2021
An in-depth demo showcasing the live flow chart view along with expanded functionality and added features was presented at VMworld 2021!
Conclusion
The Freestyle Orchestrator tool serves as a guidepost for the next evolution of the Workspace ONE platform. It demonstrates the strategic shift to allow the platform to become a more adaptable and flexible system. This effort also demonstrated how close collaboration across design, product, and engineering was key in creating this net new tool.
The Freestyle Orchestrator is a key part of the Workspace ONE platform and has been built upon since its initial release. The product team has expanded to enable continued growth of the orchestration tool and continues to refine and add capabilities.
The Freestyle Orchestrator was featured in the 2020 VMworld keynote, has been promoted on the VMware EUC blog as well as a podcast on VMware’s Tech Zone, and had featured demos in the 2021 VMworld conference.