While at Citrix, I had the opportunity to work on many of our products, but mainly worked on our GoToAssist product line that spanned across Mac, PC, iOS, and the web. From there I moved on to working on GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting.
GoToAssist is the leading remote support tool for IT Support technicians, allowing them to connect remotely, monitor, and service their client’s computers from anywhere in the world. I know, the designs look dated and they should. This project took place in 2010 and looked and felt pretty awesome at the time.
The first example is the login screen. The second example shows the invite customer screen, which provides an access code for the technician to communicate or send via email.
At the time of this project, the team was primarily working on our Mac and PC GoToAssist applications and had yet to create any mobile product of our tool. IT Support Technicians often travel from site to site servicing clients computers, but that doesn’t stop them from getting calls from other customers needing their assistance, especially when you consider that many IT Support organizations that GoToAssist attracts are small businesses.
The convenience of carrying around a tablet rather than your laptop enabled IT Support Technicians to connect to a client’s computer faster while making them look good because they could respond quickly from just about anywhere.
These are examples of the in-session experience, where a technician has connected to a remote computer, in this case, Windows and Mac computers.
I initiated this project by conducting research with IT Support Technicians, understanding their context, and figuring out what feature set to prioritize for an initial release of GoToAssist for iPad. Additionally, I played the interaction designer, visual designer, prototyper, and developer (I committed a little code that’s now in production, so pretty awesome).
After some initial research and working with a product manager, I moved to doing a lot of sketching, but I didn’t do this alone. I brought a couple of engineers to sketch with me, which led to a lot of ideas. From there, I started to explore visuals and pulling in other designers for feedback, conducting some quick and dirty tests with users, and iterating to some v1 designs that we would put through a usability test.
A mobile specific site aimed at getting GoToAssist users to upgrade to a paid account. You can check out a version of this site that I’ve kept around.
Here are a few small visual examples of the many things that I touched while working at Citrix the first time. Again, I love to collaborate, so many of these were influenced by my awesome colleagues.
GoToAssist for Mac — This is a screen shot of a UI I prototyped for allowing users to connect to multiple customers to provide IT support. You can play with the prototype too.
GoToMeeting Concept — This was a concept UI for a future GoToMeeting product used during an early research and exploration phase.
GoToMeet.Me — GoToMeet.Me was a hack week project that made it easier and more personal to get into a meeting. My role was interaction design, visual design, and front-end development. This prototype was voted most creative UX solution and integrated into the product and is now used by hundreds of thousands today.