Reduce time and effort managing multiple Botkube deployments
My role: Only Product Designer on the team
Responsibilities: User research, Requirement generation, Workshop facilitation, Low and High fidelity prototyping, Close collaboration with Engineering
Overview: Design of a highly technical and complex control plane web application for Botkube completely from scratch using the open source Ant design system.
Why would anyone care?
I helped the team focus on the why before we design or code anything.
Make configuration easy
Make managing multiple Botkube instances easy
Build a home for all our future Premium functionality
Make the above easily maintainable from engineering perspective.
Workshopping out requirements
The workshop I lead followed the Object Oriented UX format. The stakeholders involved were the Product Manager, CEO, CTO, and the Botkube engineering team.
During the workshop we analysed the existing Botkube architecture in terms of configuration, as well as how to handle potential multiple instances and how all of that could work in both Cloud and on-prem scenarios in a web app.
We then started to map out the different objects, instances, metadata and core content pieces as per the OOUX format. We re-arranged the object map multiple times as we iterated on what we wanted to get out of the product.
During the workshop we also tackled (and at least partially answered) questions like:
How do we connect an existing Botkube instance to the web app?
How do we handle Role-based Access Control (RBAC)?
How do we create a new instance from the web app and connect it to a user's cluster?
Low-fi
We worked on the object map for two days. After that was done-ish I was sort of unblocked to translate our ideas into a prototype. To save time I initially didn't want to (make people) think about design systems or visuals so I did the initial work in Balsamiq.
Usability test and recruiting users
When we had a relatively detailed prototype we were ready to run a usability test. One of the difficulties probably every small startup runs into is recruiting participants. So what I needed to do was to go out of my way to direct-message users on the Botkube Slack space, on reddit, etc and ask them for a few minutes of their time.
I managed to run usability sessions with 3 participants. They provided interesting insights not just from UX perspective, but overall about the web app product itself.
Hi-fi prototypes
Once we decided we were going to go with Ant, I read through the documentation about its guidelines on all its patterns and components and begun prototyping 🤘
Here is an illustration of the relative complexity of some of the prototypes I built for the user-testing sessions and to serve as documentation for the engineering team:
Results / Outcomes
This project is till in development.
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