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High Noon for Current APM, 2: Meet the Personas.

By Legacy User posted Jan 12, 2016 03:57 AM

  

Our current thinking must change: from buyers to users to truly help customers.

Personas came out of our deep ethnographical research that we did with about 100 customers at around 20 companies. We synthesized the personas through our analysis of the detailed use cases that came from the research.

Personas are so much nicer than generic user profiles: Firstly, because we named them: Pete, Ryan, Andrew to mention a few. Secondly, personas provide excellent design targets as you avoid being self-referential. Thirdly, they are superb for communication as you will build empathy for them.

And finally, and most importantly, personas are ideal for constructive customer dialog: Next time you and I meet and you have an APM requirement for us that you would like me to support I can now – with personas on my mind – ask you about the use case you have in mind and how the feature you’re suggesting would improve your issues resolution.

And we would probably get into a discussion of how you’re using the new APM Team Center of V10, how it is thought out to be used, how user experiences are so far, and what best practices have evolved. And I would get wiser. I would see how your idea fits in. And I would encourage you to please share your ideas on these community pages. And perhaps you would even engage in the CA APM Beta Community to discuss your idea yourself with the very people developing CA APM[1]. You see: requirements driven development is really dead. Personas are so much nicer.

For you to appreciate the personas, as I now do, let me – very briefly – introduce a few:

Meet Pete, our persona for the level 1 support analyst.

Pete is managing and monitoring many systems and using several monitoring tools. Pete is not an APM expert he knows what to do from years of on-the-job training. Pete’s pain is that he is monitoring many systems, devices, and applications. The help Pete needs is consistency: alerts he can trust, not false alarms; simplification: what do alerts mean and what are the possible and recommended actions; and context: what systems are affected by an issue. CA APM 10.0/10.1 has Pete as its primary target persona.

Meet Kyle, our persona for the APM administrator.

Kyle is an APM specialist. He is often called in to install monitoring after an application failed in production, or to assist in production problems. Kyle’s primary pain is to configure instrumentation levels of services and application and to watch APM performance so he can make sure instrumentation levels will only affect business services and applications acceptably. The help Kyle needs is efficiency, simplicity, and automation of, for example, installation and management and of performance and usage of APM itself.

Meet Ryan, our persona for the Production Support Analyst.

Ryan is responsible for the health of business services and applications: availability and responsiveness. His pain is primarily that he is a bottleneck because he’s an APM expert and as such involved in too many issues. Ryan needs help to quickly understand affected services and applications performance characteristics.

The basis for tackling descriptiveness that I discussed in my last entry, and other durable problems, are these very personas as they signify our obtained deep understanding of our user’s real requirements. This is why I state that our – collective APM – thinking must change: from buyers to users - to truly help our customers.

Armed with personas and their use cases we are able to start re-imagining our user interface and start developing the APM Team Center. Thus, starting the prescriptive journey towards a truly helpful, focused, guiding, and actionable UI. Because we now know exactly the help Pete needs, the focus Kyle needs, and the guidance Ryan needs. 

We will measure our efforts against the personas and we indeed want you to measure us as well and share your thoughts with us. As said, please consider joining the beta community.

In my entry next week I’ll go E.P.I.C.



[1] http://bit.ly/apmbeta_instructions

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