Tasked with designing the interface for a software and OS patch management system, I conducted contextual interviews with corporate IT System Administrators throughout the US to better understand their process for upgrading software across a network, and to gain an understanding of who these people are.

In the course of conducting interviews, many system administrators said "I just wish you can make it as easy as iTunes." Armed with my research, I was able to convince BMC that we needed to explore designs that leverage patterns from consumer products instead of sticking squarely with an interface that exposed every conceivable configuration option as a text field in the interface. The result drew heavily upon Apple's iTunes as a model for data organization and interaction. Instead of playlists, administrators created "Patch Lists". Functionality was added to create "Smart Lists" that dynamically included patches based on attributes specified by the user. Pull-down menus and modal dialogue windows provided this web-app a rich user experience that resonated well with users.

While at BMC, I iterated the design of a reporting tool that provided hardware details for a given machine. Lessons learned during the research of the Patch Manager product were applied here as well.

The toughest part of this project was working toward changing BMC's engineering-heavy culture to accept Design as a key stakeholder. I coined the phrase "System admins are people too" which helped humanize the approach taken toward product design.