Introduction

In the fast-paced world of software delivery tools, ensuring our products are user-friendly is crucial. Balancing rapid feature development with creating a delightful and intuitive product was no easy feat.

Today, we’re excited to share how we transformed our product's usability score from 44 in 2022 to 64 earlier this year in Jan 2024. 

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Reflecting on the Journey 

In 2022, our SUS score of 44 from 400 user surveys revealed several shortcomings: a steep learning curve, a clunky interface, and occasional performance issues. As a startup with ambitious goals, we acted swiftly to address these problems and improve the user experience. 

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Strategies That Made a Difference 

Here’s how we improved our score by 20 points: 

Revamping the User Interface: 

We designed the pipeline creation experience with the introduction of a pipeline studio - a canvas purpose built to make the addition of deployment stages and steps intuitive. Next we revisited the navigation to scale up the product offering. Then it was onto a degree of consistency with the introduction of standardized connector experience. The result was a cleaner, more user-friendly experience. 

Boosting Performance and Stability: 

Our developers optimized performance by reducing the payload size of the Harness delegate and introducing well documented steps to self-serve the delegate installation process with downloadable logs, leading to a more reliable and efficient tool. 

Implementing Continuous Feedback Loops: 

Regular feedback channels CAB sessions, including customer interviews, user surveys, allowed us to address issues in real-time and make iterative improvements. 

AI:

And over the years, we expanded our AI capabilities to include fast first-time setup without the toil. You can skip the click, drop and configure routines of pipeline generation while keeping up governance requirements and instead specify your intent in natural language and the pipeline is generated for you - including the industry best practices.

Our most recent study with 190 respondents earlier in the year put us at 64 points on the system usability scale.

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Looking Forward 

The leap from a SUS score of 44 to 64 highlights our commitment to improving usability and user experience. While we’re proud of our progress, we know there’s always room for enhancement. We aim to continue using user feedback, refining design, and optimizing performance to deliver on improved experiences. We’re eager to see how these improvements will further benefit our users. Stay tuned for updates as we strive to make our software delivery platform the best it can be!