CloudZero Product Design & Enhancements

The Challenge

Cloud computing is mission critical for nearly every modern technology business. Companies can spend thousands—if not millions—of dollars each month for the cloud bandwidth they use, but it’s hard to know what’s working efficiently and what isn’t. And if a line of code or an application is using more than its fair share of bandwidth, the result is one very big (and probably unexpected) bill. That’s where CloudZero comes in.

CloudZero is a cloud cost efficiency platform that puts relevant, timely data at engineers’ fingertips to help them proactively manage cloud infrastructure costs and get more intelligence about their cloud spend.

CloudZero’s application was built for engineers by engineers. But as can happen with an application that evolves quickly, sections of the application utilized different visual hierarchies and elements. This resulted in a highly functional but somewhat disjointed user experience as you moved from screen to screen. When CloudZero’s marketing team began a significant corporate rebrand, they realized it was an opportunity to update the affordances and usability of their app, while ensuring its visual design aligned with the new brand experience.

Our Approach

On the surface, ZeroDegrees’ charge was simple: act as an integrated part of the in-house team, create a unified set of patterns that users could easily identify and employ, and apply new brand standards across the various sections and components of the application.

Going page by page, element by element, we improved the experience and ensured its consistency. We standardized styles. We improved labeling and icon usage. We reoriented page layouts for greater consistency. 

• Before
• After

Along the way, we uncovered a specific pain point with the existing application that we knew design could solve. Aside from the design of menus and screen elements, we realized some graphs and data visualizations had accessibility issues. For people who were colorblind or had vision issues, many of the graphs and dashboards that communicated important business intelligence were difficult to read.

Leveraging the new brand standards, ZeroDegrees did a thorough study of color patterns and developed a highly orchestrated palette that would work for people with vision issues. Even if you couldn’t distinguish between hues of color, we presented the color values in ways that the contrast ensured readability.

The Results

For CloudZero, consistency became king. By creating flexible, unified components, developers now had a codified system they could easily leverage for future development and system updates. And the more requirements they brought us, the more we saw just how well the system worked.

Overall, we ensured that data was being clearly communicated. And we were particularly proud of some unsolicited feedback from one of CloudZero’s own color-blind employees: “Awesome, I can finally read the graphs.”