 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. Welcome back to Discover 2016. We're here at the docklands at Excel London. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage, Brian Jaco is here. He's the worldwide UX architect for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Brian, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you for having me. User experience architect, that's not somebody that we typically interview from HPE and theCUBE. What's that all about? There's not many of us. So my role is an interesting combination of having a technical background and having been at HP for quite a while now and doing software development. And then more recently I moved into the area of design and really wanting to improve the experiences that we provide for our users. And so I began studying the area of human-computer interaction and cognitive psychology and began to realize that there's actually a lot of improvements that we can make if we just focus on those basic fundamentals and the research that's been done in this field to improve our user's experiences. How does cognitive psychology relate to user experience design? It's a great question. So cognitive psychology deals with how the humans, how we interpret information, all the senses that we get, whether it's what we see, what we hear, what we feel. And there's a lot of research that's been done that for example, just the careful use of colors for example, like something that's red, not using red unless it really needs the user's attention. That sounds so simple, but in fact, that can be a terribly distracting technique that's used if it's used inappropriately. So you'll see in our interfaces when they come up, nothing is red by design unless it needs your attention. And so that's one very practical way that we use cognitive psychology to make sure that we're using the way we're programmed, it's nothing we've been trained or nothing we've been taught to do, but the way our minds and brains sense information to use that where we intentionally use things like color and sound only where they're needed to help our users be successful. When we were talking beforehand, you said that you're working a lot with the hyper-converged systems which tend to be used in branch offices by people who aren't computer scientists. What are you doing with the interface to make those rather complex systems easier to understand? Yeah, exactly. So one of the products that we're announcing today is this new version of our hyper-converged infrastructure, the hyper-converged operating environment. And we've done a lot of work to make sure that that interface is simple for generalists to use, that's who we refer to. They may not have been trained, they've not had any prior experience and they don't have to to be successful at this platform. So what we've done is we've designed this interface to be approachable and visually appealing, but it's also very approachable where they can come in and the data that's important to them is right there in front of them and the tasks that they need to perform are right there in front of them. The other thing that we've done is we've leveraged patterns that are familiar to them from their consumer devices. So things that they're familiar with on their mobile phones or other devices, we can take those and applying. So it's not something they have to learn, but they can still be successful at this interface even though they're applying that learning to a new area. And Brian, you sit in the software-defined group under Rick Lewis' organization, is that right? So you're aligned with the hyper-converged, the one-view, the hyper-converged, the cloud environments? Yes. Okay, so talk a little bit about, let's start with actually that portfolio if we could, you know that portfolio well. So set that up, it's composable, it's hyper-converged, Synergy, HP's made a big play in that space. Give us the update there as best you can. Yeah, absolutely. Let's tie it then back to UX. You bet. So it all really starts with the foundation of our infrastructure, including composable infrastructure, where we have built the user experience around that to be something that is usable by a lot of different users, whether they be more expertise in areas like storage or networking or in the server area, but then we provide an API on that. One of the key things with the Synergy platform in the composable infrastructure is having this unified API that lets this environment be used in many different contexts. And that's what we built upon. So our hyper-converged environments utilize those capabilities that are in HP one-view in order to be able to compose the infrastructure. We're doing maintenance on the environment. The generalists don't have to be experts there, but they can still perform these maintenance operations without having to be an expert. So they were using that technology inside, but it's not something the user has to interact with. And then we move into cloud environments. It's very much the same kind of experience. Today we're also announcing the combination of Cloud System 10 along with our Synergy platform. And those two together provide some really great capabilities where the cloud operators can program the infrastructure using a very simple interface. Underneath it's accessing those same capabilities that are provided by the Synergy unified API, but they get an experience that's cloud-like where they can on demand with a self-service portal and get access to these resources very easily. So we're seeing an evolution of what used to be called converged infrastructure. We still use that term, but it's sort of my mind. It goes all the way back to Teradata. That are the first instantiation of converged. And then Exadata was actually a project between HP at the time and Oracle. And that obviously evolved. And then sort of VCE emerged and HP at the time, which was essentially bolting together networking storage and compute. And now we've seen this sort of software-defined, hyper-converged infrastructure emerge. It's a huge Nutanix IPO. You guys are obviously through your hat in the ring with Synergy. So is that an accurate description of the evolution and how does HPE differentiate itself from some of those other guys that I mentioned? Right, that's a great question. So yeah, I think there is, there's a lot of elements that have been feeding into this all along where we've had, we kind of went from, if you look at it from a software point of view, we went from like runbook automation, right? And orchestration of tasks. But what we found is while you could be productive in doing that, it required a big investment in order to be successful with that. By having all the pieces that kind of our customers, when they were converging things and bringing them together, it became a pretty complex investment, pretty complex environment and a big investment to make that work. So as you've seen the transition into composite or first converged infrastructure, we began to put more and more of that into the platform. So we made the firmware more capable. We added in capabilities like HP OneView on C-Class. That was another, that was where the converged infrastructure really started coming to life when we started bringing those capabilities together. And then Synergy is the place with the composable infrastructure that really differentiates HP. We're the only vendor in the industry that has composable infrastructure. And by using this unified API, that really is what gives a lot of our customers the efficiency and the ease of use that they're looking for. Because then they can use whatever environments they're familiar with. They can use environments that if they're using a platform that's in our partner ecosystem, it's a growing ecosystem, it's thriving. If they're familiar with Salt or Ansible or Chef or Pop-It, there's all kinds of these places where they can be efficient using the environments that they're most comfortable with. And that's an important part from a user experience point of view. A user experience goes beyond just a pretty UI. It's got to be that, but it also has to fit into what the work practices are needed. And part of that means it might be that they're not using our UI. They're using automation in their own environments that they're driving. And that's a big part of what we're doing is making sure we meet the user's needs. Where do you take inspiration from in user experience? And outside of just Apple or other computers, what do you think products do you think define simplicity of user experience? Yeah, that's a great question. And there's so many examples out there that I enjoy using. And even if you follow some of the new startups like Uber has at their app, they just redesign their app completely. And that thing I mentioned earlier about making their app disappeared, I saw another writer write about it that way. And they simplified it. They made it all about just getting the writer and the driver together and removed a bunch of the information. So that's a big place that I look. I also look at things that my kids, I have kids who are in high school and look at the applications that they're using. Because obviously they'll gravitate towards what's easy, right? They're not going to make any investment. If it's hard to use, they're going to not go there. So I don't, so that's an area that I also find inspiration from. Another area that I look is outside of the whole looking at technology even. My brother-in-law is a potter. And I looked at how he designed his, and he doesn't actually start on a potter wheel. He starts with a sketchbook and sketches out ideas. And when I look at how we do the process we're doing design, that's often where we start on pen, paper, on a whiteboard and are sketching out ideas. And it's actually, there's a lot of parallels between the art disciplines and the design disciplines that we're driving right now. I also have looked at like music composers and how they compose music. It's a fascinating world on how they do it. They often, I've seen sketches on napkins of their, you know, they're putting together symphonies. It's pretty crazy how they, the parallels that we can see between doing design of an application to media that's completely different. And so each of those provide interesting points of inspiration for me. And your data points, I mean who did you interview when you started sat down to sort of develop the UX and the UI? Was it, you know, data center operators? Was it people in the branch offices? I mean, they have different needs. So how do you- Absolutely, that's a great point. And that's, there's two key principles with user experience that are important. They're going to sound obvious when I say them, but they're often overlooked. Number one is know who your users are. So you just mentioned data center operators. They're a different user than the developer who's consuming services. And so we can't extrapolate one from another. We have to actually know our users, whether they be operators or the generalists that we talked about for using those who are consuming hyper-converged environments. They're not the same users as an experienced IT administrator. And so each of them, we have to know who the users are. And then we also need to know what their needs are. And so there's a discovery process that we go through. We use several different techniques. We will collect qualitative data. In fact, right now I have a survey going where we're surveying developers in the enterprise to get some qualitative data around that. But we're also going out and meeting what their customer is doing ethnographic studies so that we actually see them work. We see what their environment is like to make sure we're designing the right project. They're the right products. I am, one of the things I observe about UX design and UI is that oftentimes the UX leads function. In other words, what I mean is you'll envision something that the users want. Something that's obvious to value to them. But the product doesn't support that function. And so the UX and UI designers put it in there and it leads the roadmap. How do you square that circle? Is it just iterative? That's a good question. In fact, when I first started in this more focused user experience role, there was a lot of groups that I worked with that were UX was kind of an afterthought where if it didn't work very well, then let's put some UX on it and see if we can fix it. That's not the way to do it, right? That's not the way to do it. Instead, UX is actually a really strategic part and I'm really happy with the leadership that the software defining Cloud Group has in Rick Lewis. He is absolutely, and Tony O'Neary goes all the way to the top, are really supportive of having user experience be a strategic part of these products. In fact, when we first started these hyper-converged offerings, user experience was called out as one of the most important things. Now we're on stage. We don't talk about it in that sense. We talk about the capabilities and how it's going to give the benefits to our customers. We started from that lens so that we can make sure those capabilities make it into the product. Now, we also are pragmatic. We have to shift products and you could get into a cycle where you continue to polish and make it perfect and not shift product. So we do have to make some trade-offs, but that's one of the great things about user experience design. It's all about living within constraints. We have physical constraints. We have things that are possible in our technology today and things that are not that we would like to do, but we just can't yet. So we have to make the best experience we can given the constraints that were given and iterate and continue to make it better. But you have to have visibility on what those constraints are. Sometimes it's fuzzy. I guess you as a product, former product guy, have a pretty good understanding of it. That helps. That certainly helps. But there's probably still a gap there in terms of what's happening in the labs. I mean, you're always saying, all right, this is the goal and that's not going to work this time. You're not going to get into this rev. So the specific question is, are those development people part of the UX design? I see the UX process as being a three-legged stool. We have the design team and I lead a team of designers in the software-defined and cloud group. There's also the product management teams who are working with the customers. They know the technology area, the market that we're going after and the competition and then the development teams. All three of those are really key contingents to make sure we're doing something that's feasible. Because ultimately we need something that has business viability, is technically possible, and has a desire from our users. And when you get the union of those three, that's what's important. In my experience, software developers tend to regard UX as being kind of an afterthought. It's pretty pictures. How do you bridge that gap and get them to think of the experience from the outset? That's a really good question. I think that's kind of a position where we've been and we're continuing to move through that to a change that perspective. But we've come a long way and now we're at the point where our development teams are looking to us and saying, okay, we need to do this. Can you help us design this experience that's going to meet this need? Versus it being an afterthought. So there's still pockets of that, but I would say in general, we are definitely moving to a place where it doesn't work that way. Because when it's treated as an afterthought, it never looks good. The lipstick on a pig analogy comes to mind, that's just not what the end users want. Why do we have such an emotional reaction to design? And I think Apple introduces the menu bar and the net goes crazy with controversy with people arguing about whether this is a good or a bad thing. Why is this so visceral? You know what, that's a good question. I think part of that is it's our human nature that we all use applications and we all form our own bias and our own opinions. And so we can all therefore become our own kind of, if it was like in my ideal world, here's how I would want it to work. And if our desires don't match up with what the companies actually do or if they change something around, then it's disruptive and we tend to not like that. You can look at every vendor when they've changed something, you know, the transitions that Microsoft has gone through on their desktop environment, every one of those is met with pretty visceral responses, as you've said. Even I was reading a study that there's a major vendor out there, when they make a change to their user interface, they know that their customer satisfaction scores are going to go down and they expect them to be down for two months before they start to climb back up. So this is not just a perception, it really does. I mean, customers, any kind of change, it takes a little bit for our users to get over that. But if we've done it well, then yeah, there's going to be the initial shock of, oh no, you know, you've changed this on me. But if we make them more productive and make it easier to use, then even if they did know how to use it before, they can be successful again. Well, that too depends on whether you raise prices. I mean, they're going to sales force it. You know, introduce lightning and raise prices and everybody was upset at having to learn a new interface. But ultimately though, it's, you know, clearly, I mean, people want clean, they want simple, but you talked about the three sort of stakeholders, the design team, the product management, the development team, you got to get those guys, you're a global organization, you got to get those guys together. And so how do you practically do that? Do you have these sort of weekly sprints? I mean, late night meetings, I mean, how do you practically get those three constituencies to pay attention, not be checking email and no focus? So I've got a project we're leading right now, kind of the next thing that we're working on. And I have multiple meetings per week with those three contingents to make sure we're all on the same page. So part of this right now, it's early, so we're in the research phase. So I mentioned that research project we have going. But the other thing we're starting to move into is getting more product definition around it. And it's all three tied at the hip. So it has to be intentional, it doesn't happen by accident. It has to be something that we set up and we are doing that to make sure we're aligned. Because otherwise, if you get those three legs of the stool out of whack, then you end up with not getting to where you need to be. And then when do you bring the execs in? Now when do you show Rick Lewis in Antonio? Because as Paul said, some functional design, they may say, I don't like it. When do you introduce it to the viewer guys? So I'm a big fan of being open and transparent and the leadership that we have in this group now responds really well to that. So we show things earlier than maybe people would be comfortable with. I would rather that and know if there's something that's really wrong with our direction versus getting too far down a path that's not going to work and be aligned with our strategy. I've talked to a lot of hyper-converged vendors over the last couple of years and I can't remember one of them that said that user interface was a differentiator. Is that going to be different for HPE? Well, you know what? In Rick Lewis's spotlight session that's coming up, he's going to be making the announcements about the hyper-converged environment that we're giving a really big update to that we're announcing today. And on the stage, he's not going to say it has a great user experience as far as those exact words, but he is going to talk about being simple, reducing cost for management, making the system easier to use and to maintain to lower those costs. So while the vendors and our competitors may not mention that, it is something that we're paying attention to and I'm convinced that the vendor that's going to win with hyper-converged and become the market leader is the vendor that has the great user experience because in the end, that's what's going to drive cost. Is it a great user experience? Absolutely. Yeah, it's world class. It is really, really good. And so the proof is not, you know, Rick or Antonio talking about it, it's your customers talking about it. Yeah, absolutely. I'll be showing a demo of it actually today on the stage. So I'm really excited about it. I think it's great and I think our customers are going to love it. We've already done some focus group studies and gotten early feedback on it, went through some usability testing. So it's not something I'm guessing about. We know that this is going to really be received well. What is the most effective method that you have found to study user response? Focus groups have their weaknesses, of course. Observing people's behaviors on the web is another way. What works? So I don't think there is one way to do it. You have to use multiple methods to be able to do that. One way that we do it that I find is very effective is once you have something that users can use, then we have a usability lab that's down in Houston and we'll bring in users and we'll record them. So they're outside the company, they've not been exposed to this before, but we record them, we can see their facial expressions, we can see their screen, we can record what they're saying, so we know what they're doing. That's a really effective way. Now there's downsides to that one because it's limited in the number of people that we can expose that to because they're pretty high overhead in getting all that set up. But we also know from research that once you get between five and seven people going through, which is not a big number, you'll get to about 80% of the issues. If you have major issues, you'll get to them, you'll discover them through that technique. So that one is really effective. If you want to drive up more quantitative data than using analytics that are built into the applications where they can send that anonymous feedback back, that's another good way, then there's others as well that we can use to make sure we're measuring it. But that's one way that has been very effective and we've been successfully using that for quite a while. All right, Brian, well, thanks. Well, we'll leave it there. Congratulations on getting to this point, and we're excited to hear this afternoon on the keynotes. Thank you, me too. It's been my pleasure. Okay, we'll be right back right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover 2016's in the Docklands at London Excel. Right back.