Research-informed design in Red Hat Virtualization
Research-informed design in Red Hat Virtualization
What I did
Led the UX design and user research effort for Red Hat Virtualization
Identified areas of Red Hat Virtualization that would benefit from in-depth user research
Collaborated with the user researcher to create test plans and run user research studies
Led the team to make design decisions based on research insights
Collaborated with user researchers, developers, and project managers to bring UX more to the forefront of the product development process
Background
Red Hat® Virtualization is an enterprise virtualization platform that supports vital virtualization workloads, including resource-intensive and critical applications.
Virtualization allows you to create multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a single hardware system. Source
Red Hat Virtualization is also known as oVirt in the open source community.
Red Hat Virtualization was the product that I spent the most time working on while at Red Hat. For two years, I led the UX efforts for the product.
My role
UX/UI Design, User Research, Visual Design
Tools
Sketch, Marvel
Platform
Web based application
Timeline
October 2018- February 2020
Design goal
Bring user research into the product team’s design process and embrace user research and data driven design decision making in Red Hat Virtualization.
Design process
Before joining the Red Hat Virtualization product team, no prior user research was done on Red Hat Virtualization. As a UX designer who loves research and sees the real value in research informing design decisions, I was keen to incorporate different user research methodologies into our design process to take the next step in Red Hat Virtualization’s UX journey.
The path to team buy-in on user research went something like this.
Research informed design is a collaborative effort.
You need to get user researchers involved since they have in depth research expertise. You want to get buy-in from project managers and developers and convince them of user research’s importance if they are unfamiliar with it.
Some of the different research methods we used to inform design decisions of Red Hat Virtualization included:
A baseline usability test of both the administrator and virtual machine portals
A usability test on exploratory design mockups
A card sorting exercise on user settings to better understand the user’s mental model of user settings
A card sorting exercise to understand users priority of the different featured columns in various table views
Examples of research informed design in Red Hat Virtualization
Before
The ‘Create a New Virtual Machine’ form in the virtual machine portal before user research was involved.
The ‘Create A Virtual Machine’ form was a basic, singular page without much instruction or additional information.
In testing the ‘Create A Virtual Machine’ form, 100% of participants wanted more specific information to choose from when creating a virtual machine. Some participants also mentioned that they were expecting to receive more feedback when creating a new virtual machine.
After
The ‘Create a New Virtual Machine’ form after a redesign informed by the user research.
In testing, users wanted more specific information to choose from when creating a virtual machine. A stepped wizard with more virtual machine setting options was the solution we came up with to meet the user's need for more information and specificity when creating a virtual machine.
Before
The virtual machine portal homepage before user research involvement.
When the user first entered the virtual machine portal in Red Hat Virtualization, this was the first screen that they saw. Besides using the Ctrl-F keyboard shortcut, there was no easy way for the user to search for a specific virtual machine.
In user testing, most participants raised concerns about managing a lot of virtual machines using this view.
After
The virtual machine portal homepage after an update informed by the user research.
Based on user testing feedback, filter, search, and sort options were added to the virtual machine portal homepage to make it easier for the user to manage their virtual machines.
Even simple feature additions like adding a filter or search bar helped improve Red Hat Virtualization’s overall UX.
An exploration of what the virtual machine portal homepage would look like with a list view. The newest version of PatternFly, Red Hat’s design system, was used for these wireframes.
Results from user testing also helped to inform more future facing designs of the virtual machine portal. In testing, 83% of participants mentioned that they would like to have a list view option for viewing virtual machines in the virtual machine portal. I thought this was a very valid piece of feedback from users and explored what a list view might look like in a future version of the virtual machine portal.
What I learned
Building up a research practice takes time. It took us a few months to get the first research study off the ground, but we were averaging about one new research study per quarter once we built up research momentum.
User research is a team sport. It involves collaboration between user research, design, development, project management, and the rest of the product team to see a research study from start to finish.
Invite folks into the research process. I found it extremely beneficial to invite developers to sit in on usability testing sessions to see what it is like and build more empathy for the user.