Background

Teradactyl LLC. is a software engineering company that offers products and services for centralized network backup and recovery of high performance computing and distributed processing environments over local and wide area networks. The company provides innovative backup technology for large institutions generating unique data sets in mission-critical or high-value research, scientific, imaging, and other unique intellectual property applications.

My Role

I worked namely on the UX design for a web application for their flagship software product, the True incremental Backup System® (or TiBS), but I also designed and developed a redesigned corporate website for Teradactyl, as well as completed printwork and tradeshow signage projects.

Challenges

• The current application was administered only through the command line. There was no interface at all.

• From my point-of-view as a designer it was extremely difficult to design from nothing, with little understanding of the very advanced system in a discipline I didn’t know anything about.

• The team was small, was extremely smart, and was affiliated with the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. However, they had little experience with managing a web development process, so there was a learning curve there as well.

Project Goal

The goal was to create a web interface to manage backups, storage, safety, and recovery of data, essentially taking the existing product out of the command line and making it accessable to all levels of personnel, as opposed to just a select few.