Role: UX Designer
Employer: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Year: 2023

Overview

Service outages in a cloud network can be costly to customers. To provide additional guardrails in the load balancer service (LBaaS), the product team devised four ideas to help customers avoid such expensive service outages. Through design workshops, we tested the robustness of these ideas and explored alternatives.

Design Workshop: Idea Beetles

What is an Idea Beetle?

It helps you evaluate if your idea is strong, has ‘legs’, or needs more thinking.

Preparation

To facilitate discussion, we utilized a FigJam board. The problem statement was added as a sticky note, and four beetles were set up for the four solutions. Their legs include questions like:

• Describe the idea in one sentence.
• How does it differ from existing solutions?
• What are the potential negative aspects/things/impacts to look out for?
• How could this idea grow/scale?

Outcome

• Rethinking: We realized that some ideas required more consideration from the workshop. For example, rate limit options are also present in another part of the console in the Web Application Firewall. Would these affect each other and confuse the users? More thought and research were needed. In fact, this was later removed from this round of product changes.
• Zooming in and out: We indirectly fleshed out some details by walking through the ideas. For example, we wondered what some of the default options could be, what the use cases for these options are, and how frequently these use cases would occur, bringing us back to the bigger picture of the problems.

Storyboards

Through storyboards, we questioned whether some of the proposed solutions could be configured and edited in the same space. Other things that surfaced during storyboarding include the required inputs and relevant information that might surface in other parts of the console.

Figma Prototype

Impact

Outside this project, there has been an ongoing push to give UX an earlier seat with the product managers during product changes. Workshops like this helped the teams think through them from a less technical lens at the earlier stages of the product cycle.

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