The product is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that provides a one-stop destination for deploying, managing, and monitoring open-source data infrastructure with the most popular cloud hosting options.
The Product
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To apply my expertise in human-centred design approach and design thinking to improve the customer's product experience.
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To advocate putting the Individual end users at the heart of the product growth framework.
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To advocate for the product-led growth strategy to automate product onboarding and revenue generation across the customer lifecycle.
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To advocate tracking users’ in-product behaviour and growth metrics with proper analytics tools as early as possible.
Initiative Goals
Role
Date
Scope
Mission
Product Designer
UX Researcher
Jan - May, 2023
Heuristic Evaluation
Competitor Analysis
Friction Logs
User Stories
Task Breakdown
To promote UX understanding and advocate for user-centred design in the product development process.
Data Infrastructure SaaS Platform
The SaaS platform is a one-stop shop for deploying open-source data technologies with the most popular cloud providers, aiming to empower customers to create different data applications within minutes.
Deliverable:
Format:
Usability Guidelines 101, Heuristic Evaluation Report
Presentation
Date:
17 Jan 2023 – 13 Feb 2023
I did a review of the org’s marketing document about 3 opportunities and pipelines that generate leads, which defined the SaaS platform’s product value proposition as “needs to be easy to navigate, provides a technical dashboard view of the org’s capability.”
With the value proposition in mind, I conducted the heuristic evaluation on this digital platform to identify the usability problems that potentially cause the gap between current product performance and desired outcomes.
In the meantime, carried the mission to promote UX understanding within the organisation that was unfamiliar with human-centred design approach, and exemplified how to incorporate this design approach into its product development strategies.
The Process
The rules of thumb used to measure the usability of the digital platform:
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Nilsen and Molich’s 10 Rules of Thumb
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Shneiderman’s 8 Golden Rules
The concepts covered:
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Definition of Usability
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4 Levels of User Experience
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5 Quality Components of Usability
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Natural Mapping
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Implicit Memory
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Cortisol and Stress Response regarding Error Messages
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System 1 & System 2
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Cognitive Ease & Cognitive Strain
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Hick’s Law
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WCAG 2.0 Level AA Colour Contrast Ratio
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Principle of Proximity
The Slide Deck (156p)
Deliverable
Heuristic Evaluation
The Metric System Used
Deliverable
The Heuristic Evaluation Report
Deliverable
UX Competitive Analysis
Deliverable:
Format:
UX Competitive Analysis, Design Opportunities Identified
Presentation
Date:
08 March 2023 – 05 April 2023
Having a clear goal in mind helps maintain a manageable scope of research and keeps the analysis on track without losing sight. Here are a set of goals I outlined for this research activity:
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To identify what user experiences are standard in the data infrastructure market.
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To identify the strengths and weaknesses of the digital platform.
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To discover usability issues and UX improvement opportunities.
The Process
Step 2: Compile a list of the competitors
5 main competitors were chosen for this task, they are:
Aiven, DataStax, Confluent, AWS, and GCP
Step 3: Identify the key features and flows
I defined 4 main Parameters to evaluate the products, which are “Onboarding", “Manage Resource Folders”, "Create A Cluster”, and “Manage Clusters”.
Step 1: Specify the goals of the analysis
Step 4: Analyse the data
This step is to identify the commonalities and differences between products.
Step 5: Summarise and present the findings in the comparison tables
I pulled all the insights into the matrix tables and categorised them into the predefined parameters. Inside the table, I named the strengths and weaknesses of all platforms evaluated, where the direct UX performance comparison can be viewed at a glance.
The concepts covered:
During the Competitive Analysis, I also identified the competitors’ product strategies used. I outlined the strategies to help understand the landscape of design solutions that are available on the market. The relevant concepts include:
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AARRR Pirate Metrics
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User Activation Flow
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How to Increase User Activation
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In-app Onboarding
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Psychology Behind Human Behaviour
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Onboarding stages throughout the customer lifecycle
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Causes to Low Activation Rate
Deliverable:
Format:
Friction Logs Part 1 & 2, User Stories, Task Breakdown
Excel Spreadsheets
Date:
May 2023
With the insights gained from the Heuristic Evaluation Report and UX Competitive Analysis, I dived deep into the end-to-end journey of a potential customer when using the SaaS platform, and tried to understand how they feel frustrations and joy.
I developed two Excel spreadsheets to capture a list of the gaps between what a user expects to be able to do, and the functionality of the SaaS as it stands, and framed them around a narrative of multiple customer use cases.
Creating friction logs is an excellent way to identify opportunities to improve things. It helps step out of the role of a SaaS owner, product manager, developer, etc., and into the world of an end user. By working through challenges from their perspective, we will be able to quickly build a healthy level of user empathy.
The Process
Friction Logs
By defining the user pain points and user goals/needs that were distilled from the friction logs, I created a list of User Stories to articulate how the design opportunities will deliver the particular value back to the individual end user.
I shared the friction logs with the dev team over Slack to inform them about the product UX, where we can focus on key problem areas and brainstorm a range of ideas, and quickly implement them to test if they help address issues or not.
I also broke down the user stories into a list of specific actionable tasks, with the help of one of the PMs in the team, where we can estimate the design effort, Devs + PM effort, and evaluate the customer impacts and prioritize improvements together.
User Stories & Task Breakdown
Friction Logs
The Comparison Tables (14p)
Deliverable
Friction Logs
Deliverable
The Slide Deck (338p)
Deliverable
User Stories & Task Breakdown
Deliverable
Wrap Up
The work was a completely new realm for me and I spent my first 1-2 months diving deep into the org’s core services and the SaaS platform that provides self-service access to a stack of open-source data technology solutions.
As a role that had never existed in the org before, it’s also a mission of mine to promote UX understanding within the company that was unfamiliar with human-centred design approach. This was an internal project that was initiated by me and started off within a small management group. The relevant UX activities were conducted from January to April.
During the Heuristic Evaluation, I not only evaluated the digital platform against the rules of thumb, but also gave a thorough introduction to each usability design principle, accompanied by the good and bad examples of digital interfaces, with the evaluation results of the online platform.
I also proposed to run some card sorting sessions with the end users to sort out the taxonomies (categories & labels) for the content and features of the product to work out a more intuitive AI, but put it on hold as it was different from the org’s traditional approach to end users.
In the phase of Competitive Analysis, I was using 5 different competitors’ products every day and examining their systems at the same time. I mapped out their resource hierarchies as well as the primary task flows, so we could do a direct comparison between all platforms evaluated. I also analysed the product strategies used behind their design solutions and outlined the possibilities when a similar strategy is incorporated into our product development. The process was somewhat mentally tiring, but rewarding when I extracted valuable insights from it.
In the end, it’s the friction logs that I shared in Slack helped the dev team understand my work and they started to see the potential challenges from a customer’s perspective who used the SaaS platform.
Overall, the process was quite challenging, as almost all teams are backend-oriented, on top of that, the adopted product growth strategy is inclined to sales-led. In this sense, introducing consumerization and human-centred techniques was bound to be a tough path to follow, as the chances of my design decisions based on usability principles being confronted by the preferences of senior members in the teams were quite high. In spite of that, I'm glad to see a slow shift in other team members' attitudes towards ux when implementing interface changes within the planform.
My ideas for moving the product forward would be:
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Update the value proposition to have a clearer product vision statement
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Use the research findings to determine the best course of action
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Work with the devs to prioritize the UX improvements
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Introduce usability testing to the product development cycle
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Add product goals and vision to the product backlog
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Regard user feedback as product growth opportunities
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Adopt an agile mindset of continuous product improvement
Final thought
