Redesign Sauce Labs App Management

During my time working in Sauce, I am involved in revamping the entire app management experience to solve customer problems and enable future scalability through integration of various functionalities across our product offerings.

Redesign Sauce Labs App Management | Year: 2023

Problems

There are several reasons for the redesign of app management. The primary reason is driven by customer feedback. We heard from customers that they were having difficulties organising and managing their app builds mainly because of our limited app management structure. With current app management, all the app builds that customers uploaded for testing are placed in one central location with only flat file structure. This causes trouble for users managing apps for different environments and different testing purposes.

Other reasons for the redesign include considerations for future scalability and alignment with the long-term product vision of creating a unified and user-friendly central app dashboard that integrates various functionalities from our product offerings.
All in all, redesigning app management will serve as an important initial step in accommodating these developments.

Goal & Focus

Design a user-friendly and scalable app management system that aligns with the user’s mental model, facilitating effortless organisation of their applications and quick retrieval for testing.

The Team
1x Product Designer (Me)
1x Senior Product Designer
1x Product Manager

Key Contribution
User Research
Journey Mapping
Insights Synthesis

Concept Testing
Mockups Design
Prototype Testing

Design Process

Inspiration - Research & Synthesise

Research is king, especially as a newcomer to the workforce and touching on a new field, research becomes even more important. Fortunately, before I even started working here, many other product designers had designed, researched, and envisioned early concept of app management. There were also personas targeting different user groups of Sauce Labs as well as their journeys for me to look through.

So I mainly started from collecting information from our existing knowlege base. Try to understand who are our users, what are their needs and pain points, what have been done so far and what do we envision.

Inspiration

User Journey Mapping

After identifying the target users for the project, I worked with PM to map out the user journey. During this process, the PM, who has a background in app developing, explained to me the mobile development cycle and how our product intersects with various stages.
This really helped me to understand the needs and pain points of users when interacting with our product.

Inspiration

Competitor Analysis

To gain more inspiration, I also conducted a round of competitor analysis in an attempt to understand how app management is currently handled by us (Sauce Core and Test Fairy) and the competitors (Google’s Firebase and Microsoft’s App Center). Evaluate the strength and weakness of different ways of handling. Pinpoint the outlier and close the knowledge gap.

This series of preliminary investigations gave us insights to initial questions such as:
1. How do users organize their apps on these platforms? What kind of grouping mechanism they use?
2. Why do users need to organize their apps?
3. How many levels have users created to manage their apps?

Ideation - Ideate & Prototype

Based on the information collected from inspiration phase, I started to have some ideas for possible information architectures. So I shifted gears to focus my energy on ideating all of the possible solutions for new app management.

Ideation

Data Model/Concept Ideation

I created 4 different concepts and wrote down each of the limitations and benefits. I also projected what the interface would look like with future features to ensure that the concept would scale to our product vision.


After multiple rounds of iterations and discussion with PM, other designers and stakeholders, we landed on a final concept with these features:
1. Introduce a new hierarchy model incoporating an extra layer called “project” on top of apps to provide a flexible grouping mechanism.
2. Enable users to tag on app builds to provide extra unique values to identify.
3. Show “recently tested” section to assist user workflow.

Ideation

Concept Testing

To validate this concept, we conducted internal concept testing by interviewing 5 key customer-facing employees within our organization, such as technical account managers, customer support engineers, and solution engineers. As individuals who regularly interact with customers, they possess a deep understanding of user complaints and pain points. We presented them with the new concept design prototype and gathered their feedback.

At first, we were slightly worried that users can’t understand the new hierarchy. But from the testing, we got relatively positive feedback about the new structure. It was a relief for us because we ensured that we are heading in the right direction and that people can understand the new hierarchy model we proposed, which is our original goal: introduce an app management system that aligns with the user’s mental model.
Other than that, our internal testers also suggested a number of improvements to the new design, which were carefully collated and prioritized for design modification.

Implementation - Build & Measure

You will never know precisely until you build it and put your idea out there to the world for your users to use and continuously measure and learn. Especially, we are building a platform serving multiple user types with numerous different behaviours and preferences.

At this stage of the design process, we aim to build the high fidelity design and push it to a subset of external users to gather insights on usability and to uncover any hidden issues in the workflow before handing over to the development.

Implementation

Hi-fi Design Prototype

After finalizing the design direction and information architecture, I proceeded to flesh out interfaces and user flows. At this stage, I designed more high fidelity prototypes, incorporating our company’s design system while also utilizing data that closely resembles real-world scenarios. This included simulating actual app data, version numbers, and possible categorization methods within the interface. The itention was to facilitate easier comprehension and foster discussions among team members, enabling them to identify any potential logical gaps or flaws within the design.

Implementation

Task Analysis

To test our design out there, we decided to run an unmoderated clickable prototype testing by using Maze as a testing tool and Pendo as a recruitment method.
We asked users to go through a clickable prototype with 4 tasks and report if they believe they completed each task, how hard they would rate them, and their thoughts around the way.
We wanted to mainly validate:
1. If the users can easily navigate to the specific version of the specific app.
2. If the workflow for uploading the apps into project was clear and intuitive to our users

In the end, we were able to gather 21 responses + 6 responses from the internal pilot run, which gave us 27 data points to analyse.

This fine-grained method of testing enabled us to pinpoint areas of the design that were successful and areas that needed further iteration. We then took those learnings and made even more improvements to the final design.

Conclusion - Retrospective & Key Learnings

It is not easy to redesign a software service that already has many users. When users have already developed a habitual mental model for your product, it takes a lot of effort to introduce a new mental model and make it easy for users to learn without rebounding. Extensive research and discovery at the beginning is important, but I think what also important is through a continuous process of think, build and learn to see what is working with users, what isn’t, and what improvements can be done to the solution over time.

I am grateful for the trust from the team to let me who just onboarded for no more than a month, take on the responsibility of designing this project and give me timely help during the process. According to our product vision, we will add app distribution and error reporting functions to this project in the future. There are still lots of potential and improvement for this and the impacts are expected to be significant as well.