Live Migration
Created a guided and transparent end to end experience for users to easily migrate their on-prem clusters to Atlas cloud management.
HOME
CREATIVE
YEAR
2023 - 2025
ROLE
Product design
Design strategy
Stakeholder management
Cross-team collaboration
User research
User testing
TEAM
2 Designers
1 Researcher
6 Engineers
4 Product managers
1 Technical Writer
About the project
Many legacy and enterprise customers must migrate hundreds of clusters to Atlas through Live Migration. But historically, this experience has been a frustrating and manual experience, with a staggering 25.9% success rate.
The goal of this project is to identify an improved migration experience, to make entry into Atlas painless and scalable for any quantity and variety of use cases, and to increase user contentment and engagement when introduced to the rest of the MongoDB platform.
I have been the lead product designer of the Atlas Live Migration product and re-design effort for the last 3 years.
The previous experience
Qualitatively, we knew that the old experience also was visually text heavy and lacked general user guidance. Users had to manually identify and find validation set up inputs, received ambiguous errors, had no transparency into migration progress.
Live Migration is also heavily used by enterprise customers migrating over hundreds of clusters from on-prem and self-managed systems to Atlas. Thus, there was a huge business opportunity here to help improve their experience and retain revenue.
Research methods
Thus, I conducted multiple preliminary methods to gather more data and identify key pain points and opportunity areas:
10 Internal user interviews
3 Migration service competitor analysis
2 Design studios with 12 stakeholders
I also validated multiple iterations of work with external user testing and follow up interviews:
4 External User tests
10 External user interviews
Introduced a home page
Previously, the Live Migration feature was hidden under the cluster card. Now, users have increased awareness through a dedicated migration home in the project level side navigation.
Automated validation and verification
Previously, set up was very text heavy and needed manual input of source and target information. Now, it is integrated into the migration flow, with guidance and automation at every step. Users just need a connection string or cluster name. Atlas will automatically verify the migration.
Tracked migration progress
Previously, migration was only visible as a small progress bar located under the target cluster with vague terminology used for migration stages. Now, there is a dedicated migration progress page with stage explanations and metadata details.
Simplified cutover and completion
Previously, cutover was a stressful and confusing process. Through iterations, we found a balance between migration terminology correctness and ease of understanding. Now, cutover has more layman terms, guidance and automation. Users can learn more about Atlas features by exploring their new clusters on migration completion.
Success tracking
After the 2025 implementation of the live migration UI along with multiple engineering correctness efforts, the Atlas live migration has drastically improved in success rates and in bringing a cleaner and more automated experience to users.
of all Atlas live migrations are now automatically and successfully verified during the migration process. Users no longer have to opt in or manually verify their migrations.
of all Atlas live migrations are successful, excluding user caused errors. This shows an increase in experience navigability and backend assuredness, especially from the original 25.9% success rate!
of all migration now use Atlas live migration and are self service. Larger migrations still require the usage of standalone mongosync and migration factory help, but future endeavors to add filtered sync, resumability and customizable parameters to Atlas live migration will improve scaled usage.
Learnings
CROSS TEAM COLLABORATION
I have always worked very closely with my engineering team. This project highlighted the importance of involving engineering early and frequently in the design process, utilizing async communication and keeping a living document for notes and decisions as a result.
FLEXIBILITY AND COMMUNICATION
In 2023, this was my first large blue sky project. By struggling with the unknown, I learned to be more comfortable with it - that included being flexible with planning and communicating changes early and clearly.
STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
This was my biggest lesson in stakeholder management and empathetic communication. I learned to help everyone’s voices be heard in important conversations but also, to prioritize feedback from a user and business perspective for a good balance backed by reasoning.
SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTISE
As a product designer working at MongoDB, a database company, I’ve always loved the technicalities of every project I work on. The extent of the migration hub project allowed me to explore my creative problem solving skills and the flexibility of our timeline and engineering resources allowed me to user test and update iteratively.