Helping engineers troubleshoot using logs
A redesign for one of New Relic’s fastest growing products.
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.
A log is one of the oldest computer-generated data points that contains information about usage patterns, activities, and operations within an operating system, application, server or another device.
The overarching problem is customers want to be able to scan and search through logs with ease. Allowing our customers to troubleshoot faster and find the information they are looking for quickly.
I worked on 3 product teams as the lead designer and collaborated with PMs, Engineering, Research, Execs, and other Product Designers. I led the direction and team on everything from research, design, to strategy. I owned the end to end design experience.
PROBLEM
Difficulties scanning and searching through logs
To understand our customers I set up weekly calls and asked questions about use cases, pain points, and what their north star would be in a logging product.
I worked with the team and our customers to develop a customer journey. So I could better understand how engineers used the product to troubleshoot their software. This helped us understand and prioritize common use cases.
Summary of insights:
We had multiple complaints about the usability of our product. This led to customers being confused on being able to troubleshoot and complete tasks.
We had customers asking for features we already had available.
So many bugs and performance issues that was often causing people to complain about the UI/UX.
DISCOVERY RESEARCH
Understanding our customers
Allow customers to focus on data (logs).
There is a lot of different use cases for logs, allow customers to set up the logging table to best fit their needs.
Improve discoverability of existing features, features were behind an ellipses not easily discoverable.
Allow customers to easily spot error logs.
Create a consistent experience across our manage data section.
GOALS
Logging redesign goals
Instead of testing with current New Relic customers I sent our designs to software engineers who have never used New Relic Logs but have experience troubleshooting with other observability products. I wanted to understand a new users mental model when trying to trouble shoot a basic issue using our product.
Changes based on testing
Expand logs changed to be clear and allow customers even more flexibility.
A lot of feedback around attributes. Which leads us into the next case study.
TESTING
Usability testing
Note: Release with the redesigned navigation
PRESS RELEASE