How we helped Appvia while they were recruiting a permanent UX lead
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Developers develop. But often, their starting point is what the tech can do, not what the user needs. For its Kore Operate system, Appvia took a different view, placing the user at the heart of the experience. Sophie Freiermuth’s challenge? To help make a fiendishly complex system accessible to every developer, not just the smartest person in the room.
“[As a developer] it's very easy to get into that box of assuming the user will understand everything you do. But they don’t because you haven’t told them yet. Sophie helped us understand how to reveal information in the right way at the right time to help our users make informed decisions.”
- Mark Hughes, Product Engineering Manager, Appvia
Unless you spend your days in software development, you probably won’t have heard of Kubernetes. It’s an open-source system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. Put simply, Kubernetes is how big systems – think the ticketing system for the latest must-see stadium tour – operate fast, handling thousands of transactions simultaneously without falling over. More than that, the system gives organisations flexibility – scaling up and back as demand dictates, ensuring a business is never short of bandwidth and processing power, but doing it in a way that keeps costs under control. It's the not-so-secret sauce behind Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and more. But app and software development isn’t easy. Every business wants to deploy its latest innovations as quickly as possible, but the complexity – and the challenges of connecting teams who may be using different Kubernetes-driven platforms - often gets in the way.
Not just for specialists
Everyone using Kore Operate is a developer. Technical understanding is a given. But there’s a big difference between a product every developer can use, and a product accessible only to a select few specialists.
“We wanted to improve the user experience (UX) to meet developers where they were rather than requiring them to adapt themselves to Kubernetes,” explains Therese Stowell, Product Director, Appvia.
“What we’re trying to do with Kore Operate is make some of the complex stuff much more self-service so people who need it can access it without having to understand too much,” adds Mark Hughes, Product Engineering Manager.
“There’s inherent underlying complexity in this. But we wanted to expose the right decisions to users without them being overwhelmed by the complexity of what the back end is doing for them. It’s really about how you make the user experience tight and focused so users understand the choices they have to make.”
Appvia needed to recruit a permanent user experience lead, but wanted to make headway with its UX while the recruitment process continued. Baguette UX and our lead designer Sophie Freiermuth had been recommended to Therese, and she brought us onboard for three months to start laying the groundwork of Appvia’s UX understanding.
The UX challenge
As Stewart Anderson, User Experience Lead explains, the UX approach was almost virgin territory for the domain. “A little bit like finance or healthcare, there are a lot of moving pieces. Unlike finance, UX understanding in this domain is still very immature. We have years of work to do in getting the sector to understand the value of UX.
“Without that understanding, you’re perhaps not always aware of the risks you’re taking as a developer. First impressions matter – if you don’t get the user experience right, word of mouth spreads pretty quickly.”
“I wanted to de-risk that work by doing a concept model which is really building an understanding of how developers understand their work,” says Therese. “This was a challenging one. The technology is very complicated and the product is very complicated. It’s not like working on a cooking app where everybody cooks.”
User research - “the molehills that reveal the volcano”
As with everything else in this segment, user research isn’t easy. There aren’t many people who work with Kubernetes. Even fewer can talk about it. The pandemic added still greater complexity, with Sophie operating remotely throughout. She implemented a series of steps to find potential candidates who would be interested in the research, gave them an easy way of booking an interview slot, and set up simple discussion guides online, all the while ensuring data privacy and permissions were established and respected.
The research explored numerous areas, but amongst the most prominent was access control. “We have a graphical interface (GUI) and a command line interface (CLI),” explains Mark. “They’re two different ways of interacting with the product. We think that the journey most users will make will be an introduction via the GUI, then using the CLI a bit more as they develop expertise.” Sophie’s work was the first within the business to explore whether that assumption was correct.
Adding to Sophie’s user research challenge was the fact that, whilst she went to great lengths to understand the complexities of the subject matter, she is not a developer. Usually, she would know whether an interview subject was talking from a place of competency or saying what they thought she wanted to hear. “This is a common bias in interviews,” Sophie explains, “and you need to be attuned to it. In any other sector I’d be able to detect authenticity (or lack of it). But that’s difficult when you don’t have the depth of technical knowledge that your interview subjects do.”
“In any research you find moments that needed extra digging – the molehills that reveal the volcano. I was able to find those by having an engineer on the call with me who could jump in when the interviewee was discussing a technical point. They helped me pilot the interview in an appropriate direction.”
The approach worked well: “I really felt I was able to bring out all the value I could despite the challenges of the technical side.”
The results
“Access control is a complex area even for experts,” Mark confesses. “Sophie was able to ‘get’ that and find validation that our approach was something users would potentially understand. That may not sound like much but it’s a massive area. For someone who’s just getting to grips with this themselves and then having to go out and find others to talk about it, that was a really key part of the journey and we’re now starting to see that input coming through in the product.
“Having Sophie on board really helped drive our thinking in a user-centric way,” he adds. “We found ourselves asking ‘how does the user know X, Y or Z?’ a lot. Often we found that they didn’t know. We knew, but they didn’t because we haven’t told them yet – so how do we reveal that information in the right way at the right time to help users make informed decisions?
“That’s what Sophie’s done – she’s enabling the right decisions at the right time.”
Sophie’s assignment was only temporary. Taking up the reins was Stewart, and part of Sophie’s remit was to ensure a smooth handover.
“A couple of weeks before I joined Sophie compiled a list of onboarding stuff,” he says. “That was a big help and saved a lot of time. During the handover period she really got stuck in and helped out – she has a ‘can do’ attitude that’s much less common than you might think.
“She was very giving with her time,” Stewart recalls. “We had twice daily catch-ups and she was really flexible with those. She briefed me well – and that’s a gift – you don’t always get briefed well.”
For Therese, the success of the project lies in what it enables for the future. “When you go from ‘no design’ to ‘design’ there’s a bunch of groundwork that needs to get laid. Sophie definitely helped Stewart lay that groundwork and enable him to pick up where she left off.”
Proof that engineers can talk to designers
“I haven’t worked directly with UX designers before,” Mark states. “To work with someone who understands the user journey from the principle of how a user works rather than how the technology works – it was really good to have that interaction.
“Someone who understands how users use a web page – how they scan it, how they find information, what they click on – all those things you might intuitively know a little bit – but someone who can put all of that in context with the technology you’re developing – that’s really valuable.”
What’s it like to work with Sophie?
“Oh she’s absolutely lovely,” enthuses Therese. “She’s so positive and creative and energetic and insightful. She’s an absolute joy to work with.”
“For me it comes down to ability and attitude,” adds Stewart. “She’s a great communicator. She isn’t afraid to get stuck in – she just throws herself in. She isn’t risk averse and that’s a great feather in her cap.”
“I would wholeheartedly vouch for Sophie’s ability as someone who takes the effort to understand the user and the tech,” says Mark. “She understood the back end problem and blended that with a sympathy for the user – that’s an excellent perspective to have in a team as it adds intelligence to your decisions. It ensures someone’s focused on the idea that the user doesn’t understand everything you understand as a developer.”
“I actually asked to keep Sophie on for a couple of weeks beyond her original contract end date,” says Stewart. “The fact that Therese had confidence in her and I wanted her to stay speaks volumes. We miss her!”