Migration Portal

Migration portal helps businesses/users to migrate from their old Oracle Database to EDB’s Postgres Advanced Server Database. It checks migration readiness and analyzes Oracle database schemas(Structure of the Database in layman’s term) and converts objects to support Advanced Server. It makes the schema compatible before migration to the new Database.

My Role

I led the design of Migration Portal and my role is to completely re-think the product as the initial beta release was completely designed by engineers and was not very well received among the users. As a gateway to EDB’s Postgres Advanced Server Database, Migration Portal have a lot of responsibilities and so as I and the team. Here few key goals we set for ourselves.

• Understanding the user’s behaviour and expectation from the product.
• Prioritizing the user’s workflow and make frequent tasks delightful.
• Market EDB’s Postgres Advanced Server.
• Delivering technical help seamlessly in the system.
• Comfortably migrating the users from the old to the new app.
• Onboard the new users.
• Continuously improve Migration Portal.

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User Research

Before evaluating the beta product, I spend some time understanding the users, what’s organisation’s expectation and what competitors are doing.

From stakeholders interview I learned –

• Migration portal is a free tool offered by EDB
• And this free service will funnel potential new customers of EDB’s Postgres Advanced Server and other services.
• Migration Portal helps in the first of 4 steps in DB migration. Nudge the users to services provided by EDB for rest of the 3 steps.
• Ideally, Migration Portal’s Engine will make Oracle Schemas compatible with EDB’s Postgres Advanced Server. However, in practical scenarios, it cannot be achieved. The current accuracy of the engine is 95% – 100%.
• DBA’s have to fix the schemas manually which were not or partially converted by the engine.

Personas

Now, it’s time to know what competitors are doing. I found that Amazon’s SCT is our major competitor at that moment and here are the things I learned.

Knowing the users was a bit of a challenge, as there was no direct access to the users. So, I started going through the customer support calls and emails and learned key insights about the issues they are facing and the goals they are trying to achieve. This revealed 62% of them are DBAs and 33% are developers.

So, I started interviewing some of the DBAs in the organisation. And here are the things I have learned –

• How they perform schema migration in the absence of a tool and how much effort it requires.
• How frequently they perform the migration.
• What other tools they use on a daily basis.
• How the migration process is carried out and the importance and impact of schema migration.
• What they expect from a schema migration tool.
• And… many more.

Pain Points in the Current Journey

Enlightened by the user data, I ran them through beta app along with standard usability heuristic and achieve following results –

Conceptualisation

I started creating the information architecture and low-fi concepts for primary use cases. After having a go-ahead from the Product Owners, developers, and Stakeholders on the mockups, I began to conduct usability tests with the rapid prototypes. And here are the takeaways –

Information Architecture

Wireframes

The Solution

After getting the data from user testing we made changes in the prototype and test them to validate the solution and released the Migration Portal 2.0.

Here are few key highlights –

Post-launch

After launching the re-designed site we monitored the traffic for some time, we found noticeable increase in traffic and completion rate.

Next steps…

These are my current target that I am trying to achieve –

• 10% increase in conversion rate by streamlining the friction in the task flow.
• Provide more intelligent help for fixing schemas to increase the success rate to 60%.

Feeling Good