Sorry that I missed your PM, I actually had several there waiting for my replies. I will get to them! Regarding usability, there is always a balance that must be struck between making the product easy to deploy, against the functionality that others who are more experienced demand, against again the background knowledge required to wield such a product.
For example, some products cover their insane complexity with multiple wizards. Whereas others believe wizards are simply a crutch against bad design in the first place. Other products have a "basic" mode and an "advanced" mode, which sounds good on paper but when you have to acutally traverse through both modes in order to find the functionality you are looking for, thats a problem.
Take our IPS for example, we received a ton of good press and huge positive feedback about how we structured it for V7, in removing the dozens of groups and raw rules, and focusing instead on what resource you are trying to protect and auto-applying the appropriate patterns (we still look to improve all this further btw). However the cost of this was the advanced users (which there are a lot of in the security market) missed some things with this new system.
Design is always a tough thing to "balance", in that it would be great if Astaro could be more linksys-y, but to be honest we have about 2000% more features and functions than a linksys can field, and putting all of that in a gui which doesnt overwhelm someone immediately, while still having the right tools in there for those that know how to use them is the core challenge we relish in trying to solve. I do think our solution is less chopped-up and kludgy than many of our competitors, and if you look at say ten players in our space, most of them have a sort of tabbed/navigation style GUI, with different takes on how the terms and user-flow should look.
We are hard at work on both lowering the bar for entry into using an Astaro gateway with all of its features, as well as making sure the features and functions are there so it can deal with the thousands of configurations that it must be able to accommodate.
I will say that any usability improvements anyone likes, we'd love to hear about, especially in our feature portal. Generalizations are tough to understand such as "make it like a linksys" but specific suggestions that we can try to incorporate is a good start, along with posting here about where exactly you are getting de-railed is great feedback so we know where to focus design on...
Sorry that I missed your PM, I actually had several there waiting for my replies. I will get to them! Regarding usability, there is always a balance that must be struck between making the product easy to deploy, against the functionality that others who are more experienced demand, against again the background knowledge required to wield such a product.
For example, some products cover their insane complexity with multiple wizards. Whereas others believe wizards are simply a crutch against bad design in the first place. Other products have a "basic" mode and an "advanced" mode, which sounds good on paper but when you have to acutally traverse through both modes in order to find the functionality you are looking for, thats a problem.
Take our IPS for example, we received a ton of good press and huge positive feedback about how we structured it for V7, in removing the dozens of groups and raw rules, and focusing instead on what resource you are trying to protect and auto-applying the appropriate patterns (we still look to improve all this further btw). However the cost of this was the advanced users (which there are a lot of in the security market) missed some things with this new system.
Design is always a tough thing to "balance", in that it would be great if Astaro could be more linksys-y, but to be honest we have about 2000% more features and functions than a linksys can field, and putting all of that in a gui which doesnt overwhelm someone immediately, while still having the right tools in there for those that know how to use them is the core challenge we relish in trying to solve. I do think our solution is less chopped-up and kludgy than many of our competitors, and if you look at say ten players in our space, most of them have a sort of tabbed/navigation style GUI, with different takes on how the terms and user-flow should look.
We are hard at work on both lowering the bar for entry into using an Astaro gateway with all of its features, as well as making sure the features and functions are there so it can deal with the thousands of configurations that it must be able to accommodate.
I will say that any usability improvements anyone likes, we'd love to hear about, especially in our feature portal. Generalizations are tough to understand such as "make it like a linksys" but specific suggestions that we can try to incorporate is a good start, along with posting here about where exactly you are getting de-railed is great feedback so we know where to focus design on...
