E.P.I.C.
One of the core elements of the current APM E.P.I.C. strategy is the user-centered product design approach. There are a number of UX product design techniques that we are using to execute on this strategy. We already shared with our community, how we synthetized our discoveries from ethnographic research into a Persona design artefact. Personas are great design tool that is helping us to prioritize our efforts, but it is not the only technique that we are using to gather user feedback.
Agile Design
At CA, we recently adopted Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as our primary development framework. Through tightly orchestrated iterations, individual agile teams can deliver fully working product increments faster than ever. These product increments do not always equal an external release, but they represent an important product milestone. The greatest value of product increments is our ability to validate the product early, and learn from user feedback.
APM Command Center's Product Owner Florian_Cheval listening to users during on-site visit.
The goal of this article is to give the APM user community an overview of user research techniques that we are using. As an APM Command Center Product designer, I would like to illustrate how we are synthetizing the feedback in our team. I would also like to encourage you to engage directly with the team. We understand your busy schedule and the fact that one-way remote WebEx presentations might get a little boring, but we are constantly improving on this to make these sessions more productive and entertaining at the same time.
On-site visits
As an agile team, we already have our mission defined by the global APM strategy and product roadmap. We know that Kyle, our APM admin persona that represents many individuals, is having hard times installing, configuring and upgrading his Agent environment.
To be able to design detailed product features, we need to understand why. We need to understand the specifics of as many APM Agent environments as possible, and share this mutual understanding within the team. One of our core research techniques is to directly visit users on-site and look over their shoulders.
APM Command Center Prototype shared over InVision LiveShare and Webex.
During the initial design phases, we are going through a number of rapid prototyping iterations. The primary goal of these prototypes is to demonstrate the intention. But we recently moved this to a next level, and some of you already had a chance to experience our prototype validation session. We directly share click-through prototypes and ask you to try to perform a certain use case. These sessions were very valuable for us. We were able to see and hear your direct, raw, unprocessed and honest feedback. And from the feedback we received we can tell, that this was also much more fun for you as well and it was nowhere comparable to a classic demo session.
End of Sprint demos
We would like to include as many of you as possible in our end of Sprint reviews. That is unique opportunity to review not only the intent in form of a prototype, but a real working software increment. But again, we understand that the feature-by-feature demo might be a bit boring way how to spend Friday afternoon. So we are planning a significant improvement for near future: We want to shift from “showing it” to “experiencing it”. For the future product increments, we will be able to share our real demo environment with actual product increment that you can access through the internet to directly try new features on your own.
Steve Warren, APM Command Center Scrum Master, prioritizing user feedback with the team.
There are multiple channels how we are trying to engage with you – our user’s community. Each of the communication channel has its purpose and is very important for all APM Teams. In this article, I outlined how important it is for the Agile Team consisting of Product Owner, Designer, Scrum Master and Engineering team to directly engage with users through research, prototype and end-of-sprint sessions. We are constantly improving how to make these sessions more valuable and entertaining.
My Team is called Mensa, and we are working on APM Command Center. The best way to engage with us is to sign up for APM Beta Community forum and drop us a line there. If you do not know where to start, just respond to this article with a comment, and we will get in touch with you.