Prod to Push

PROBLEM SPACE

At Pivotal, our team was always vexed by customers who had invested time and money on a world-changing platform, only to see it go unused.

Old habits die hard.

The Pivotal Labs Platform Services team sought to train and enable core IT leaders by having them install and test their own cloud platform.

PROJECT GOALS

Create an app that reduced confusion

Train & improve experience for first time users

BUT CAN WE MAKE IT FUN?

The Pivotal Labs Platform Services team was incredibly successful in their efforts to enable digital transformation and improve the developer experience.

One challenge became a consistent headache, though: getting people to use the thing their team had just built. Shockingly, over and over, companies that would invest millions of dollars into months of consulting, training, and enablement struggled to find traction amongst their own developers.

As our internal team workshopped the problem, a simple solution emerged: an onboarding portal. And as I moved from feature prioritization to sketches, the refrain was always, "But can we make it fun?"

Devs tripping on the last step.

FIX YOUR OWN PROBLEM: AKA THE TERRORS OF REVEALING YOUR OWN DYSFUNCTION

The pre-existing Empty State was devoid of on-time training and instruction.

There are always inherent problems with trying to solve your own problems, and this project wasn't any different:

Contextual bias
Solution bias
Repetition blindness

In this case, it appeared that the comfort of habitual repetition had made it just too easy to continue doing what they'd always done.

In addition, through a Flow Audit, I identified that the existing Pivotal Cloud Foundry software flow required 6-8 clicks (yikes) to get to anything meaningful, and when they did, developers were met with poorly designed Empty States.

DESIGN ARTIFACTS

DESIGN HIGHLIGHTS

SPACEMAN BRINGS THE FUN

Bring a new branded marketing approach to the onboarding process.

A. Product logo has prominence but can be replaced with customer logo
B. "Space" is a great context for discussion about cloud platforms
C. The spaceman is gender-neutral, has plenty of poses, and brings delight

NO FALLING

Encourage users to follow the step-through.

A. Use the data available for personalization to build trust and familiarity.
B. Apply redundancy so that people clearly understand the simplicity of the process.

FINISH STRONG

Complete the circle in a way that's familiar to developers.

A. Use the pre-authorization to grab and pre-populate their dashboard
B. Encourage people since this is a new experience
C. Give users the ability to take common actions

HOW I DID IT

METHODS & DELIVERABLES (6 MONTHS)

Journey mapping
Stakeholder research, live
User interviews, live
Problem definition
Flow mapping
Feature prioritization, live
Event schema
Iterative design
Working prototypes
Product in production
Email template

TOOLS

Launching properly meant providing email templates to platform leaders

End of an era

OBSERVATIONS & NOTES

One major constraint: the project had zero budget, so the approach to resourcing the project was unique. Non-billable time would be used to pair on a solution when we could. Turns out, that's a great approach—it gave us time to design, iterate, and test properly. That was an unexpected win.

During the product's use, reactions from the field were positive. People seemed to love it. Unfortunately, the project's final iteration had been deployed just a few weeks from the VMware acquisition of Pivotal. Due to org changes, the project was archived before any extensive measurement of success could be gathered.

// CREDITS //

Voyage is the consulting collab of Matthew Reiswig and friends solving problems and blowing minds since forever. | Read at Medium. Connect at LinkedIn.

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