Application Experience Management

Product Landing Page

Timeline: Dec 2022 to June 2023

What is AXM?

Application Experience Management(AXM) is a tool to monitor and manage installed and web applications, surface actional insights and highlight where the potential risk related to applications are lying in an organization. It helps IT administrators to reduce number of service desk tickets and mean time to remediation of any application related issues.

Problem

Businesses spend a large chunk of their budget in running and maintaining applications in their organizations. IT Administrators are constantly firefighting application performance and struggling to provide seamless user experience with installed, web or hybrid applications.

Objectives

1. Reduce IT cost spent on monitoring and managing applications by 50%.
2. Reduce new applications cost by 25%.
3. Reduce service desk tickets due to applications by 50%.

My Role

The Application Experience Management(AXM) team at 1E Inc. consists of 1 product designer(myself), 1 product manager, a backend team, a database team, 2 front-end developers and one QA engineer.

I led the research and design efforts for this project. My role ranges from gathering product requirements, conducting research, collaboration with the stakeholders, prototyping, testing and polishing the product.

At the end of my tenure, I have handed over MVP designs and tested for on-premise and SaaS applications.

Users

To understand the users, the product manager and I interviewed 5 of our customers. I asked them about the roles, responsibilities and challenges of the administrators who are responsible for managing applications. We discovered that there are primarily two types of personas:

Persona-1: Director of Application Experience

The main goal of the persona is make the use of the applications enjoyable and take necessary decisions in her organization but there is no concrete data to back it.

Persona-2: Application Manager

Application Managers needs to guarantee the responsiveness, stability, performance and usage of the applications in his organization but there is no visibility/evidence to support that.

Competitor Analysis

To identify product gaps, I did a competitive analysis with 3 major competitors. I read their product portfolios, blogs, reviews and watched their marketing videos to get collect the insights.

The main insight from the study was that we needed to:

1. Make the product easy to adopt.
2. Give the visibility to the issues.
3. Show what has deviated from normal.

User Story Mapping

Based on customer’s pain, I came up with a list of user stories for the Director of Application Experience and Application Manager which conveys what they want to achieve and how are they going to help them.

I had a user story mapping exercise with the product manager and the engineering team. We discussed

1. What are the stories the team can achieve overall?
2. What stories would be part of Minimum Viable Product(MVP) and future releases?

All the stories were grouped into epics and and epics into initiatives so that an estimate can be made for sprints.

User Flow for MVP

I used the shortlisted user stories to create a user flow with the dashboards for both the personas which guided us throughout the MVP stage.

Brainstorming

On shortlisting the user stories with the team, it was essential to get answers to a few important questions. So I arranged this “How Might We” exercise online with the team to generate a lot of creative and crazy ideas catering to the user stories.

The design solutions catered to both SaaS and on-premise applications. For this case study, I am focusing on the details of on-premise applications.

Ideas generated by the team for the “How Might We” exercise.

At the end of the exercise, we shortlist the best ideas under each HMW question to go ahead with.

Information Architecture

There were a lot of ideas generated during multiple brainstorming exercise. I gathered the ideas and fabricated a draft information architecture to discuss with the product design team. The product design team helped me organizing the whole thought process in presenting to the engineering and product team for further refinement.

Initial Sketches

Based on the information architecture, I created some initial sketches to present the ideas to the team and to get their quick feedback. The exercise helped me in translating the information architecture into visual screens and doing the first design iteration very early.

Wireframes

The feedback on sketches helped in creating the first cut of the wireframes. I showed the wireframe to the the other members of the design to figure out the early usability issues.

We collected feedback based on the wireframes to understand the value it can deliver to our customers. Based on the feedback, I did some adjustments to the wireframes based on its severity.

Iterations

There were many necessary iterations done to the design based on the feedback from all the stakeholders. I would like to highlight one which was a bit challenging due to complex nature to data representation.

The chart is depicting outlier session based for one metric(Busy Cursor). The outlier session is calculated with percentile method. You can click on any bar to see the corresponding session in a drawer in the first design. But later we discovered that that granular data is required by the users so we simplified the design by indicating the important insights.

Further Descoping

At this stage the team realized that the engineering were overwhelmed to achieve the MVP by the timeline. So we need to cut down on

1. The alerts.
2. Performance and usage insights of applications.

The MVP

I kept collecting constant feedback from the customers to keep with with the their pain points to align the design with the expectations. I iterated the designs a few times based on the customer feedback, technical limitations and team’s bandwidth. This resulted on up to date and timely release of the MVP.

High Fidelity Design

I used the native design system at 1E for high fidelity designs.

Key Results

Before MVP release, we let a couple of users test the product to gaze its capability.

1. They reported that by just knowing on which all devices applications are performing poorly, they have reduced their IT service desk cost by 20-25%.
2. They can see which all applications are performing poorly which helped reducing the service desk remediation time by 40%.

Challenges and Learnings

1. Don’t deviate from use cases — It was very important to keep in mind the use cases of the products on the platform. While interviewing, IT administrators want features available in existing product as a part of this new product but we focused on the main journey first and planned on connecting all the necessary products and give unique solutions to get the jobs done.
2. MVP doesn’t solve all the pain points — While defining scope for MVP, it was difficult to provide at least one single journey which makes an impression on customers because there are multiple pain points related to each other.