Everpure VMware Savings Calculator
Designing a platform for behavior change courses and health content
Role
Product Designer
Company
Stranger Creative
Category
Technology
Date
2024
Introduction
Everpure Data helps organizations modernize their data infrastructure with high-performance, scalable storage solutions. As part of its virtualization offering, Everpure needed a way to help VMware customers understand the potential financial and operational benefits of switching storage platforms.
I designed a VMware Savings Calculator that translates a customer's existing infrastructure and configuration into an estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison. By adjusting a small set of technical inputs, users can quickly see potential savings across hardware, power, rack space, and cost per VM.
My role
As a Product Designer, I worked with Everpure's team to design the end-to-end experience for the VMware Savings Calculator.
I translated complex technical and financial requirements into an approachable interactive tool, working across information architecture, interaction design, wireframing, visual design, prototyping, and developer handoff.
A key part of the work was finding ways to simplify a technically complex configuration process without hiding the inputs and assumptions that make the resulting calculations meaningful.
THE CHALLENGE
— How might we make a complex TCO calculation approachable enough for customers to explore on their own, while still providing the technical inputs and detailed results needed to support an enterprise purchasing decision?
The calculator needed to account for a range of infrastructure variables, including deployment size, RAID configuration, data reduction, licensing discounts, hardware refresh cycles, and the timeframe used to calculate TCO. Rather than presenting users with a dense technical form, the experience needed to progressively guide them through these decisions and make the relationship between their inputs and the final savings easy to understand.
Goals
1
Simplify a complex decision-making process
Transform a technically complex TCO calculation into a clear, guided experience that allows customers to easily explore different infrastructure scenarios.
2
Translate technical data into business value
Surface financial and operational outcomes in a way that makes Everpure’s value proposition immediately understandable to both technical and business audiences.
3
Establish the refreshed brand in a digital product
Translate the refreshed brand into a functional product experience while establishing reusable UI patterns and components for future digital experiences.
Delivery
A progressive, two-step configuration flow
Users first select the size of their VMware environment, with predefined small, medium, and large deployment profiles. They can then configure variables such as RAID profile, data reduction ratio, Broadcom discount, hardware refresh cycle, and TCO timeframe.
Once configured, the calculator surfaces the results in terms that connect technical infrastructure to business impact—highlighting total cost, total savings, savings percentage, cost per VM, rack units reduced, power reduction, and hardware savings.
A new visual language
As one of the first digital experiences to adopt Everpure’s refreshed brand, the calculator became an opportunity to translate the new visual identity into a functional product experience.
Making complexity feel simple
The calculator turns a complex set of infrastructure variables into a guided configuration experience, allowing users to build a scenario without confronting the full complexity of the underlying calculation.
From technical inputs to business value
Rather than returning a single savings estimate, the results surface the financial and operational impact of the proposed configuration, giving users multiple ways to understand the value.
Built for an evolving system
The calculator also helped establish patterns for Everpure's new digital experience, translating the refreshed brand into reusable UI components and interaction patterns.
Impact and learnings
During the course of this project, I learned a lot about redesigning a legacy product and bringing it to the modern age through efficient practices and design/branding exploration.
A design system that enables scale
As part of the brand refresh rollout, the team also wanted to scale our internal design processes to help produce on-brand design experiences more rapidly and consistently. By building the foundations of a design system, we were able to initiate this shift toward more mature design processes.
Embracing atomic design
By utilizing an atomic design approach, I was able to develop a comprehensive set of reusable components that has since enabled more efficient prototyping and design delivery.
Breathing new life to an established product
Prior to this refresh, our team was certainly aware of a growing list of design debt in the legacy platform. This process allowed us to address some of our outdated patterns and design bugs, which has helped make the product that much better for our users.