IBM Cloud AI System Dashboard
Cloud-based dashboard to help a System Admin monitors the system health and troubleshoots problems.
Situation
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Rising customer complaints regarding product complexity.
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Long resolution times from Support team.
Task
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To lead a team of 4 Designers (Mid-Junior) and launch the product within 3 months (in 2019).
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Champion a user-centric approach with feature-focused stakeholders, including multiple engineering teams and 2 OMs.
Impact
Customer Satisfaction
20%
Increase
Support Call Duration
25%
Reduction
Team Award
IBM Crush IT
Product Revenue
50%
Contribution within platform
Design Thinking Workshop
The initial step involved orchestrating a collaborative design thinking workshop with stakeholders, comprising product managers, designers, and developers. The aim was to delve into and synchronize the problem space, rectifying assorted assumptions, establishing project goals and objectives, and fostering a comprehensive grasp of user needs and pain points among participants.
Here is how we decided the focus area by importance and feasibility. The chart indicates that JUST DO IT is important to users and is also feasible to implement, vs Big bets is important to users, but is not very feasible to build within the given timeline. And based on those 4 key flows on the JUST DO IT section, I set two objectives to measure the success of my design.
Research Collaboration
With the insights gained from the design thinking workshop, the next step was to conduct user research to validate assumptions and gather more in-depth information about user behaviors, preferences, and pain points, and narrow down the list of items we should focus by finding out what mattered to our users the most.
User Problem
The greatest problem for the user is to find time to search for a bottleneck in a limited time because they get too many alerts and events everyday and they don’t know what to get in first. I also learned that issue resolution can be really painful because communication with support to correctly identify a physical location of a failed issue takes a lot of back and forth Webex calls, which could take several days.
Information is scattered
Inefficient problem insight
I struggle with managing numerous hardware components and software, often leading to delayed decision-making and the possibility of overlooking critical issues.
I lack insights into the problem’s impact on the system and the urgency of resolving it, making it unclear what the optimal next steps are.”
Persona
I worked with a Researcher to conduct generative research interviews to deeply understand who the customers are, and what they experience in their everyday lives. Based on what I learned, I created this persona for system Admin who is responsible for monitoring the overall health of their system for their company, and troubleshooting when there is a problem.
Goals & Success Metrics
Who
What
Wow
Primary
Betty, a system admin, can identify the components that are negatively impacting system health without having to digging into complex logs or documentation.
Metrics: Task completion rate / time, Customer satisfaction, Duration of support case, Number of clicks
Secondary persona / IBM Support
Lo-fi iterations
Fail Fast and Cheap
Then I worked with the design team and SMEs to communicate ideas using paper and pen because in a large group setting, people might have different interpretations, making it hard to discuss something without visual aids. This was also to make sure we don’t jump into design right away, but to have enough clarity on the use cases and flows.
Information Architecture
I created information architecture to decide what to show in the home page and what can be in the drill down pages based on the business priority by working closely with OMs. Based on that information, I decided to design an operational dashboard that can help a system admin manage real time metrics and KPIs. And used a side navigation drawer to save screen space to make core information visible on the Home page. In the Home page, I decided to organize high priority contents like alerts, hardware and software status, and important resource metrics.
Design Principle
Unified dashboard with fastest route to risk.
Provided a snapshot of critical data, trends, and alerts, offering an overview at a glance.
Simplified structure to drill down easily.
Insight with supporting data
Provided recommendations and next steps to address issues faster and with more confidence, and transparency.
Final Design
Design Success Validation
We conducted validation testing of the clickable prototype with 10 users for monitoring use case and used a product to measure the support case use case. Below is a summary of the findings:
Time on task
9/10
Customer Satisfaction
8/10
Users would recommend the product to a friend.
Support Call Duration
9/10
Users reduced the average duration of support cases.
Team Success
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Resolved design usability / quality issues by 80% in 1 quarter.
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Won for IBM Crush IT Award based on the high quality design and team collaboration.
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The product became one of the top selling products that contributed to the 50% of revenue within the same platform.