Product and UX Design Feedback Pilot Readout - Improving our Product with Your Insights
In late 2025, we launched a low-key pilot series of Product Design and UX feedback studies exclusively within our Community. The goal was focused: bring hands-on operators in for informal sessions to review product design at the prototype stage, before features ship, validate workflows against lived experience, and close the gap between product usability and what end users actually need.
We're excited to share that the pilot phase is complete and take a moment to report what we heard and learned along the way. These sessions helped our UX Design leads catch points of confusion early, validate what’s working, and prioritize improvements before code is committed. And just as as importantly, participants confirmed the format was genuinely useful and easy to fit into a busy week.
Thanks to our pioneering Community members and All Stars for diving in with us on the pilot!
What are the Design Feedback Studies and Sessions?
Not a beta or "Tech Preview." Not a survey and not a focus group either. These are moderated, one-on-one usability testing sessions and interviews between a Commvault UX researcher and an operator who has close knowledge of the use case, product, and workflows.
During sessions, customers discuss different aspects of the use case or workflow, navigate and react to prototypes, and provide input that directly informs product design decisions before release. Participants gain visibility and a voice into proposed enhancements and assumptions driving design and UX decisions. Commvault gains crucial feedback grounded in real operational context.
Our Early Adopter and beta programs are of course incredibly valuable too, but we know they often require installs or upgrades, troubleshooting, and time commitments over an extended period. And the outcomes are very different. Design Feedback sessions are intentionally lighter weight and more accessible for any of our end users: no setup, dependencies or longer commitment—just one hour on Zoom to review and discuss designs.
What We Learned from the Pilot Studies
All participants completed the workflow—but a few moments still felt “uncertain”
In the cloud connection workflow we tested, participants all completed the task. That’s a win, of course. However, our facilitators also saw moments where users could move forward without being 100% confident about what an option meant or what a label indicated. In data protection environments, ambiguity is more than a UX nit: it can lead to misconfiguration, extra support cycles, and worse. The recurring feedback themes centered on permission scope, how connections behave as subscriptions change over time, and whether status labels communicate the right level of assurance.
Based on what you shared, we’re focusing our next design iterations in three areas:
Clearer guidance during authentication
More in-context explanation of permission scope and recommended choices—right when you’re making the decision.
More control (and clearer rules) for subscription scope
Exploring more granular scope controls (including tag- and naming-based filtering) and making the “what happens when new subscriptions appear” behavior explicit.
Status labels that read the way you expect
Cleaning up terminology gaps (for example, “Azure managed”) so protection states align with how you interpret them and what action, if any, you should take.
And... We’re Moving Forward with the Feedback Program!
Because the pilot studies produced strong insights and the experience was positive for participants, we’re already moving forward with a new set of Design Feedback studies. We're actively recruiting in April for two new studies--one covering the Restore experience in Command Center and the other new Data Security feature design. You can read more in Jenn's post here and follow the individual links to details on the respective studies and to sign up.
As with the pilot, Design Feedback sessions will continue to be approximately one-hour structured Zoom sessions where you review prototypes or proposed workflows and tell us what’s clear, what’s missing, and what would make the experience more reliable in practice. As always, thanks to our amazing Community for the great energy and collaborative insights!
Thank you!
Roy, Jenn, Damian & The Community Team
