Google Cloud
Troubleshooting Journeys
Outcome-Driven Innovation
Staff UX Designer
Disclaimer
The following case study is personal and does not necessarily represent Google’s positions, strategies, or opinions. I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information.
Client
Role
Senior UX Designer
Timeframe
Type
Google Cloud Platform, Outcome-Driven Innovation, Framework
Feb. 2023- Jun. 2024
Overview
In early 2023, I partnered with a UX researcher to develop a Jobs To Be Done framework for Google Cloud Observability. By developing this framework, we were able to socialize the research-backed findings with the broader product team, identify critical unmet user needs, and develop a new product-wide strategy.
My Role
During the timeframe of this case study, I was a Senior UX Designer for the Cloud Observability team. I worked closely with a cross-functional group of product managers, technical program managers, engineers, UX researchers, and director-level stakeholders from the Google Cloud Platform.
Challenge
In 2023, Cloud Observability had achieved a new level of maturity. The product matched the capabilities of most observability tools in the market and was a competitive offering. With these base needs met, it was time to identify ways to differentiate the product. I saw an opportunity to help steer the team in a user-centered strategic direction.
Approach
Creating the framework
To successfully move the organization's thinking, we needed a data-driven approach centered on the user's needs. I partnered with a UX Researcher and created a Jobs to be Done framework for Cloud Observability. We chose Jobs to be Done because of its unique ability to be used as an alignment mechanism for teams, helping to bring focus to prioritization activities and instilling confidence that we are working on the right problems without dictating solutions. My researcher conducted hours of interviews and collected dozens of diary studies with our customers. Through this research, we identified five core jobs for our primary user archetype. I created a series of assets to help distill the findings in an easy-to-follow way so we could begin sharing the work with the product team.
Socializing the findings
With the framework created, it was time to socialize our findings with the team. We hosted a series of sharing sessions with the product, engineering, and UX teams. In March of 2023, we organized a cross-functional workshop whose goal was to identify a focus for the work being planned in 2023 and 2024. In planning this workshop, we created a series of activities that incorporated our Jobs to be Done framework.
A new strategy
The workshop's activities allowed the product team to quickly align on a core job that was currently being underserved. This core job was Troubleshooting. Our research illustrated five phases of troubleshooting which our users frequently move through in our product and a whole host of unmet needs. These unmet needs were inspirational to the team, and quickly the cross-functional partners began brainstorming around opportunities to meet those needs in our product. By the end of the workshop, we had a new product-wide strategic focus: troubleshooting.
Troubleshooting playbooks
With a new strategy set, I began working with a squad of product managers and engineers to develop our first troubleshooting feature: Playbooks. We identified the “Determine Root Cause + Fix Issue” phase of the troubleshooting job as the most opportune first area of focus. We leveraged our partnership with the Google Kubernetes Engine team to identify the top 5 most common issues users encounter. With these issues identified, we began to design interactive playbooks to help the user identify and resolve each issue.
Interactive playbooks are surfaced to the user in the Kubernetes UI when an error message is triggered on a resource. Each playbook represents an opinionated workflow, and each content section is concluded with a Next Steps prompt which aims to help the user determine what to investigate next based on the data in the section. A table of contents is auto-generated and allows users to skip to different chapters of their playbook. Each Playbook concludes with a Future Mitigation Tips section aimed at educating users about other tools they may leverage to help them prevent issues in the future.
In testing these five preliminary workflows, the reception from customers was extremely positive. They saw the benefit of these playbooks and wanted them for more than just the top 5 issues. This presented an opportunity; the Observability team could not create out-of-the-box playbooks for every scenario, but we could build the playbooks with our Universal Dashboard Framework, allowing users to customize the playbooks based on their needs. The Universal Dashboard Framework also opened up an opportunity for a new partnership with our Technical Support Engineers. By partnering with our TSE team, we were empowering our subject matter experts to build and publish playbooks based on the real issues they were encountering every day.
Results
Interactive Playbooks were featured in Google Cloud Next’s 2023 keynote: What’s Next for Operations and Platform Builders. Since debuting at Cloud Next, 11 playbooks have been developed resulting in a 7% decline in open support cases. Users are discovering playbooks in context and are resolving their problems quickly without the need for additional support.
What’s next?
We are continuing to develop more playbooks for our users. And in the age of artificial intelligence, we are finding increasingly novel ways to serve this need for our customers.
What people are saying…
Manager O11y Design
“Thank you Ashley for recognizing and seizing the opportunity to get alignment across the Troubleshooting workstream. Your focus on anchoring to research and UX fundamentals has been very influential in getting the broader team to think about the challenges we need to address going forward.”
Director GCP Support