Nexus Compute - Hexagon
Nexus Compute is a service which offers "Solvers on demand" for CAE users. I worked on Compute during my internship to design a feature flow and also now where I was involved in designing its customer - facing landing page and related workflows. My responsibilities included gathering requirements from the stakeholders and users for the feature and visual design for the landing page.
Associated with : Hexagon (Manufacturing Intelligence division)
Team : Robert Sieg, Eloi Gaudry
About Nexus Compute
Nexus Compute is a scalable cloud-based computing solution for simulation needs. It allows users to upload input files, choose hardware setup and get results.
CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) users can run different solvers from Hexagon like MSC Nastran, Marc, Actran, etc) utilizing a consumption-based pricing model. Nexus compute offers "Solvers on demand"and can run multiple simulations concurrently, ensuring swift completion.
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Note :
Solvers in CAE are software tools that simulate real-world physical processes to predict how something will behave.
Note : Due to NDA restrictions, only some scope of the project can be presented here
Designing the "Job configuration & SKU selection" feature
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Refine the compute hardware selection experience
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Design a layout that supports pricing information
Based on feedback received from the customers and stakeholders, we realised that users were facing difficulty in configuring their Job settings because they weren't sure which setting would work best for their use case.
Our aim was to design the configuration experience such that the users were confident of the selection they made which would in turn result in less fallouts due to frustration from the last stage within the process.
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We started off after requirement gathering from stakeholders and customers and designed the experience by staying in the continuous design-feedback-pass/fail-repeat loop with them. Collaborating with the SMEs since the very beginning helped us understand the software and workflow better. ​
Designing the customer-facing landing page
Compute already had a landing page but through user interviews, we found out that the landing page was not guiding users to the CTA of the main action they wanted to do i.e. to create a Job. In addition, the terminology used in the application was misleading users and the way the current landing page was setup was adding a few additional steps to the users' journey.
Hence, the goal was to provide more flexibility and ease of access to the most important and relevant actions on Compute's landing page.
( Before )
Some of the earlier versions of the landing page. These pages missed the main CTAs for creating Jobs and instead directed to creating documents and projects which were containers for Jobs. This additional step was removed in the new homepage design you will see below
(New design of the landing page)
Key changes :
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- Main CTA i.e. to "Start Job" visible right away. Removed the layers in between i.e. Projects / Documents, etc which confused our users. Other secondary CTAs are still handy for example. create a new working location.
- Quick access to contextual help / tutorial videos.
- Better monitoring of recent Jobs and their details like status, time, solver through the Job cards.
- Better overview of working locations and its meta data
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To conclude, the improved version of the customer-facing page is more action-oriented and is designed to better align with users' mental model.