OtterTune

Before starting on the path to redesigning the product user experience, I needed to first learn the overall function of the product, meeting with all members of the aforementioned teams, reading through documentation, Jira tickets, deep dives into competitor products and gathering customer feedback and ideas.

Meetings with my teammates were typically over Zoom (we worked remotely), but we made a point for key members to meet in Palo Alto and sit in a room together to hash out key aspects of the product, whiteboarding and brainstorming ideas and concepts until we were all on the same page. Sometimes I would quickly cook up prototype concepts on the spot to help visualize ideas to see if they made sense or not. Very free flowing, everyone speaking their mind. I thrive in this environment.

All of this made a few things very clear in what needed to be focused on in the redesign:

• While I redesigned all aspects of the site, this case study focuses primarily on rethinking the user experience of the customer dashboard. Everyone agreed that the current version was confusing, largely a list of existing database instances with a few pieces of meta data .

• Most competitor products were either chart heavy with not enough text explanation or they were text heavy with a lot of required reading for the user to read through before learning what the problem was.

• Users don’t want to spend too much time on a site like OtterTune. They want to learn as quickly as possible how their database instances are doing and the move on to other things.

• The dashboard should also be a jumping off point into all areas of the site. Even though the top level navigation accomplishes this, it’s important to create multiple entry points into all areas of the site besides just the navigation.

• If database instances are not doing well, the user wants to either quickly see a list of what to do to fix the problem or maybe even let Ottertune do it for them through machine learning and AI.

• The product was aimed at the non-DBA (data base administrator), not heavy in knowledge of how to manage a database, but more a general working knowledge of it.

• The page couldn’t be overwhelming, show key pieces of data in order for the user to be able to focus on it.

Ideally, one would prefer to be able to create a series of personas and user stories, especially when designing for more than one type of user, but often it is the case that one can’t afford that extra time early in a startup. So Figma is the home for all different types of user flows and edge cases. And for OtterTune, there was a single type of user that was being targeted, the non-DBA, certainly technical minded, but not deep in the weeds of database management.