Company / IBM
Role / Designer working with a senior designer, a senior UX researcher, a product manager, and 6 developers
Tools / Sketch, Invision Freehand, Adobe Illustrator, Mural, Github, Slack, Box, WebEx
Timeline / 6 months
How events are routed using Event Notifications
1. PROJECT DETAILS
Users / Event Notification's primary users are App Developers, DevOps Engineers, and Infrastructure owners/managers. App Devs and Devops engineers usually do the event routing and responding to the events.
As-is / In 2022, there was no centralised tool or service for event routing and notification management in IBM Cloud. Several services had their own management feature, and users had to configure integrations individually.
Vision / To create a managed event notification service to accelerate reaction time & facilitate event-driven app development using a low-code flow. In time, all IBM managed service would be integrated with Event Notifications.
Competitive landscape / Azure Notification Hubs, GCP pub/sub, AWS SNS.
Generative research and exploring use-cases
2. USER RESEARCH
Generative user research methodology / 8x1 hr moderated remote user sessions with internal and external participants.
Screener / Participants who work in large enterprises and startups. Mix of users who work as DevOps or Event Driven Developer roles. Must have experience setting up notification channels
Outcomes / Solid set of insights to determine important pain points on current notification experience on IBM Cloud. Gathered pain points from users with daily use of competitor products.
Low-fidelity prototypes
3. MVP CREATION
Need / To bring low-fi sketches from Invision into Sketch to create a high-fidelity prototype. This would be used in R.I.T.E. (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) testing before GA release.
Collaboration / Weekly syncs with Product management and Development teams to share ideas, get feedback and iterate in real time using Invision Freehand. This was to ensure we met project deadlines.
Goal / To flesh out concepts, understand terminology used in event routing space and make next steps clear and self-explanatory to our users in testing. We created a high-fidelity prototype in Sketch to handover to Development team in-line with the development roadmap.
Result / Event Notification generally released to public on October 31st 2021, only 4 months after kick-off.
High-fidelity prototype built with Sketch for user testing
4. RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) TESTING
Definition / Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) testing is a usability testing method where you evaluate a solution to a usability problem multiple times in a rapid and iterative manner.
Methodology / Working with a Senior Researcher, and Senior Designer, we held 3 rounds of testing. 3 external users in each round.
goals /
1. Obtain feedback from users of competitor products along with internal users on first release.
2. Ensure pathways and user journeys are clear to users, and improve as we go.
3. Validate our terminology and descriptions match the users mental model.
2. Ensure pathways and user journeys are clear to users, and improve as we go.
3. Validate our terminology and descriptions match the users mental model.
Clip of Round 2 prototype and user flow
5. RESULTS
Utilised user feedback to improve MVP after each round of testing. Key finding was new users found it difficult to be productive from Day 1 experience. To mitigate this we :
1. Standardised terminology and concepts using competitive analysis
2. Improved the 'Getting started' experience by implementing a 'WalkMe' intro tour
3. Created a landing page visual explaining to new users how our service works
