In App Feature

Workstation Suspend

Controls Workstation sleep and wake function

Project Details

Background
Workstation users would spin up a remote server to run Jobs or an engineering simulation, but when the user has completed the task, the Workstation would still be running and sit idle - burning unused computational resources. If their configured Workstation is stopped, the user has to go through the process again and it takes ~30 min. to start up.
Research Insights
The majority of Rescale's Workstation users will run batches of jobs for weeks at a time and it's a painful process for active users to stop a Workstation when it is not in use and then configure the setup again.
  • Takes about ~30 mins to start up a Workstation
  • When stopping a Workstation, all data is lost unless the user transfers the files to their local machine or increases their walltime
  • Templates save the setup process but still takes about the same time to start up a Workstation
  • User's workaround is to set up the Workstation every morning and close at the end of business day to lessen the unused compute
  • The suspend feature removes the requirement to set up a new workstation every morning, especially given that new setups can fail periodically causing even greater work delay
Goal
Decrease the hassle of starting up and closing a Workstation in a great seamless experience
My Role
UX/UI Designer
User Research
Prototyping
User Testing

Concept and Prototype

How can we make shutting down and start up Workstation simple?
Process to Get There
  • Involving Customers to discover pain points and present the feature idea to get a gasp of interest
  • Sync with engineers from the Workstation developer team to get a scope of what is possible
  • Work with a Product Manager to scale the project and project the business value
Design Goals
  • Follow the design language of the Workstation UI
  • Make sure users can discover the feature and are friendly to use
  • Explain intuitively which hardware can or can not be suspended
Constraints
  • Not all hardware providers have the ability to suspend due to how the platform was built
  • Simple enough solution to launch right after Workstation
Wireframe
Prototype
User Test
I created a testing plan with generic questions to see how users interact with the new feature. The test ran with a handful of current Workstation users, collecting qualitative data.
  • Suspend option was too hard to find right away
  • Users were excited about the new feature and gave an impression they would use it often
  • Discovered 10% of coretypes users selected did not accept suspend
  • The warning window on some selected coretypes to suspend was annoying
"This is the best change to my daily workload."

Final Design

"2 mins. to reactivate a Workstation - that is nothing"
Retrospective
  • All the testers show tremendous interest in the new Suspend feature. This excitement helped the decision to convert all coretype to be compatible with the feature
  • The decision to remove the pop up warning about "Are you sure you want to suspend.." help make the process painless
  • Users prefer suspending multiple Workstations at once
  • A great win for the dev team to get the reactivating suspend workstation down to 2 mins, this really helps push the usage of this feature.

Impact

2 Mins.
Total to Reactivate a
Suspended Workstation
387
Total Usage in the First
20 Days
$480K
Revenue Projected in
2023
Henry Ho