Ephemeral Environments for Octopus Deploy
Help application engineers stay in the flow
Discovery
UX Design
UI Design
Usability Testing
Client
Octopus Deploy
Date
2024
Role
Senior Product Designer
Website
octopus.com
Overview
We have a mission to enhancing the developer experience for the Octopus product. We recognize that testing is a crucial part of the application development process, and having a reliable, on-demand environment is highly valued. However, engineering teams often struggle to prioritize investment in this area, and existing tools fail to support their complex scenarios. As a result, application teams are forced to rely on costly, static environments that don’t scale efficiently and ultimately hinder productivity.
Discovery: Understand how our customers currently manage modern development workflows within the Octopus ecosystem, and identify opportunities to support more efficient environment consumption.
Research and Discovery
We began our discovery research by interviewing customers to determine the relevance of this problem within the ecosystem and how they currently navigate it.
The challenges we encountered included understanding each customer's unique workflow, infrastructure setup, and goals; assessing overall market trends and the desirability of potential technical directions; overcoming internal biases about what the solution should look like; and finding the minimal viable approach to validate the product idea and design.
My Role
Collaborating with the product manager and principal engineer, we use discovery research to identify opportunities. By leveraging design-led methods, we help the product team develop a solution pitch that positions Octopus to confidently invest in this initiative for the roadmap.
Exploring the scope: As the team equipped with more knowledge and insights, we’ve started ideating the potential solutions. We’ve summarised the team’s ideas into user job stories. After shortlisting and prioritising what to focus on, we then ideate each story individually.
Design and Validation
We began by brainstorming user job stories, selecting and prioritizing them to define the minimum lovable scope. For each job story, we explored ideas and sketched wireflows, which I then refined into prototypes. Throughout the process, we conducted customer research interviews, using prototypes to test our assumptions, validate concepts, and iterate based on feedback.
Test and validate: As a brand new concept for our existing users, we need to communicate so that they understand the complex mechanisms behind the simple configuration experience, which affects multiple areas within the product.