Connecting experiences across a 10 year old product
Legacy out and in with that new new. Leading the design of a cross functional experience.
PROBLEM
A disconnected experience
New Relic One is the leading observability platform where Dev and Ops teams come together to solve problems with data. Customers send us data and we help them monitor, debug, and improve their entire development stack.
As a company that has legacy products and is solving large and complex problems for engineers over the years the platform has grown and multiple products were released by different teams. Our customers were often having trouble connecting different flows across products leaving a fragmented experience and not able to complete troubleshooting tasks.
The goal of the project was to create a connected experience for customers accessing all different types of data… log, trace , APM data, and more. I was the lead designer across this entire project.
If a customer is in a certain product of New Relic they should be able to access data from another product so they can complete their troubleshooting task.
RESEARCH
Talking with customers and understanding their pain points
I worked with a researcher and we talked with multiple customers to understand flows, tasks, and how they were using the current state of New Relic to troubleshoot their software stacks.
A recurring theme and flow started to surface after talking with several customers. Warning: technical jargon incoming.
The most common flow is customers would receive a notification about a slow transaction happening. They would then open New Relic and look at the application performance monitoring for the slow transaction. Sometimes they would look at the trace and then they would open up logs to see the detailed information of why there was a slow transaction.
Based off this information the team and I started to form a hypothesis and a goal to connect this experience.
COLLABORATION
Working across multiple teams, stakeholders, and designers
I collaborated with multiple designers, engineers, across multiple teams and stakeholders to accomplish a design that was truly holistic and had input from multiple stakeholder and customers. We had weekly meetings with multiple teams to understand technical constraints, share designs, and understand specific use cases to their product areas.
A big success in organizing all this was having a program manager work with us and all the other teams. Highly suggest having a program manager across big complex projects.
DESIGN
Goals of design and project
After talking with multiple customers the goals of our design and project started to become more clear. The intentions of the design were to create a consistent experience and interactions to access different types of data across New Relic. We would prioritize the most common use cases first.
We want our customers to be able to access data anywhere in their troubleshooting workflow without loosing context of where they currently are. “Data in context” is a phrase we often used when describing the project to other co-workers.
Allow customers to access log data anywhere in the platform or from a time series chart.
Allow our application performance monitoring to capture log data automatically (while this was a lot of work for engineers it had a big impact on our design and experience) It would allow our customers to send application log data without having to do any additional set up. This would allow us to design a consistent experience across products because we knew the data would be available (this could be an entirely different case study and hard to capture in one paragraph).
OUTCOMES
What was the impact and how did we measure
We created an experience that is across multiple products that is familiar for our customers. The products are less siloed and users are starting to see a connected experience. There is still a lot more work for New Relic but it is a start. Some more specific measurements:
Log application data has increased our revenue (I am not able to share these details).
Customers can easily send us application log data without having to do two different installs (one for logs and one for applications).
Other teams are using my designs to further connect data across different products.