Application Experience Management(AXM) is a tool to save IT cost by monitoring installed and web applications.
Business Goals
Customers spend a huge portion of their IT budget in purchasing and maintaining applications in their organizations. IT Administrators are constantly fixing application performance and struggling to provide seamless user experience with installed, web or hybrid applications.
Reduce IT cost spent on monitoring and managing experience of employees with applications.
Reduce overall application cost.
Reduce service desk tickets due to application issues.
Solution
The solution provided to the companies was a dashboard which surfaces actional insights and highlight where the potential risk related to applications are lying in an organization. This helps make user experience with applications effortless and enjoyable.
Business Impact
21% 💰
decrease in overall IT cost
29% 💰
decrease in purchase of new applications
68%⌛
decrease in application issue remediation time
The Process
User Needs
Persona1: Director of Application Experience
Main Goal: make the use of the applications enjoyable and take necessary decisions in the organization.
Challenge: There is no concrete data to back the decisions.
Persona2: Application Manager
Main Goal: Guarantee the responsiveness, stability, performance and usage of the applications in the organization.
Challenge: There is no visibility/evidence for investigation of issues.
Iterations
After conducting extensive user research and stakeholder collaboration, we listed the metrics responsible for overall user experience with applications. Then we categorized the metrics and deduced the insights which can be easily monitored by both the personas through the dashboards. The creation of dashboards took us a few iterations and continuous feedback.
Dashboards for Application Insights
The main goal was to create a dashboard that helps both personas see any issues or trends, so they can take action to fix problems and improve the application experience.
Stakeholder Feedback:
On reviewing with the stakeholders, we discovered that the insights were useful but doesn't lead to any action. These are the insights that are meaningful and relevant to the users.
Insights on a set of relevant applications
Trend of the number of poor sessions
Make meaning of metrics by comparing them to the normal
Drill down into charts and reports for further investigation
Making Insights Actionable
At this stage, the goal was to make the insights clear so any issues can be quickly resolved based on them.
Customer Feedback:
After a feedback collection session with customers, we found out they want insights that help with decision-making and can serve as evidence. Here are the insights they mentioned.
Impact on the overall company
Compare applications
Commonalities between users and devices facing issues to know potential remediation
Easy to understand charts at first interation
Enhancing Decision Making
To make the dashboard insights clear so they can be used directly as evidence for application-related decisions.
The final iteration was approved by the customers during feedback collection session and I made it ready for development for the assigned sprint, with some minor improvements.
Challenges and Learnings
Don’t deviate from use cases — It was very important to keep in mind the use cases of the products on the platform. While interviewing, IT administrators want features available in existing product as a part of this new product but we focused on the main journey first and planned on connecting all the necessary products and give unique solutions to get the jobs done.
MVP doesn’t solve all the pain points — While defining scope for MVP, it was difficult to provide at least one single journey which makes an impression on customers because there are multiple pain points related to each other.
