Glesys
DBaaS—their first-ever product developement with proper UX
Final Prototype
Overview
Glesys
Glesys offers sustainable cloud and infrastructure services from energy-efficient data centers in Sweden and Finland. Their operations run on renewable energy and prioritize low environmental impact.
The Headache
Glesys has long, on paper, been a data-driven product company that prides itself on a research-committed product process. However, in reality, that’s meant a couple hours of market and competitive research at best.
2025 started with a new commitment: include a discovery phase in the development of new products to give research a real, fair chance—with me as their first-ever Product Designer.
The Goal
My goal: Provide enough value
through proper research to convince stakeholders that UX deserves a permanent spot in product development.
“This change is all brand new to the company. But if we want to be a product company we need to include proper UX in our process.”
Implementation
The privilege with taking part in a company’s real projects is, of course, that it’s being developed to be implemented—and this was no different: Glesys has fallen behind the pace on bringing out new products, and this was an effort to catch up to competitors.
However, this product is still being testing among a small number of clients and isn’t live just yet.
The Process
February
March
April
Competitive Analysis & User Flow
Wireframing & Prototyping
May
User Testing & Analysis
User Flow
I sat down with the project manager and sketched out the user flow for “Database as a service” to further understand how users would navigate through the entire process and where potential bottlenecks could present themselves.
The Wireframes
Why mid-fi?
Since Glesys already has an established cloud UI, I chose to create something that felt familiar in structure but stripped of color, copy, and detail—keeping the focus on layout and interaction.
First, I made a mid-fi replica of their landing page.
Then, the new service itself:
The bottom half of the page:
The ideal number of users for qualitative usability studies according to NN Group is 5, which maximizes the number of usability issues without exhausting too many resources or risking saturation.
The Participants
And lucky for me, I got 5 ‘yeses’ after a bit of a back-and-forth.
And, alas, the test results
Once all the testing was done, it was time to assign points to each of the tasks in order to pull out the data.
Scoring criteria
✔ 1 point for success
½ 0.5 points for partial success
❌ 0 points for failure
➖for inconclusive/N/A results
Performance metrics
Completion rate (could they finish the task?)
Error rate (any confusion or wrong clicks?)
Time on task (based on the average time)
Confidence & satisfaction (each participant ranked their own performance)
Results
Out of the 5 participants, 3 scored the total amount of points.
The 2 who didn’t where due to prototype errors.
All in all, the total score of the test ended at 25.6 out of 28 points, or 91.43%, which means it received an “excellent” score and no further testing was required.
Reflection
My biggest learning from this project is without a doubt this: Trust the process.
When I stepped into the role as a UX designer in this particular team, I realized at the first meeting that the project manager didn’t see any reason to do user tests, and therefore, saw no real purpose for me in the team.
I convinced him that I’d be doing work on the side and it wouldn’t hinder the team’s progress— I got green light.
At the end, when I presented my findings, I was met with a very different attitude.
He was talking about how great it was to hear direct feedback from customers
How 4 out of 5 made the same decisions on a particular choice
How we now had wireframes that were supported by data.