Background
The productization journey of Pantheon's Advanced Global CDN about half a year. I worked with a team to uncover product-market fit, designing this new suite of features for the Pantheon dashboard. Employing a human-centered approach to address our the challenges of our customers in navigating this high complex domain, the new solution paves the way for an upcoming beta launch next year.
Role
Product Designer
TeAM
Sr. Director of Product
Tech Lead
Edge Routing Engineering Team
Problem to Solution
How did we uncover the human needs of a highly complex domain?
Problem Space
Key Insights
It wasn't the first time in Pantheon's history that the need to reform managed services for scalability had been raised. However, it had never been executed due to its daunting nature. Our research provided essential insights.
Risk
Mistakes are easy to make – consequences can be as severe as taking down all sites in a customer account
Confusion
Customers struggled to articulate their objectives in their requests, not knowing available capabilities and conflating and terminology
Frustration
Customers were sometimes delayed on launching new sites because AGCDN requests were still in the ticket queue
There was great variance of user journeys depending on what they wanted implemented at the edge.
What is the common pattern of these user journeys?
Defning Success
Gaining insights into user journey patterns provided us with a fresh perspective on the project's objectives. We realized that our goal wasn't merely to provide customers with control over their infrastructure components. Instead, we aimed to develop a product that empowered customers to gain knowledge and confidence in this technical domain, enabling them to autonomously navigate and make changes on their own.
Mapping Design Goals to Features
Addressing each customer pain point insight required the incorporation of specific features. This provided us with the blueprint for building the product.
Concept Testing
Value Proposition
I led a series of concept testing sessions with stakeholders and customers. My goal was to validate the desirability of the direction my team had hypothesized. During the sessions, we gained some great insights that helped us validate and refine our direction.
Value proposition: did we get it right?
Risk
Tooling to modify traffic at the edge with simulated pre-production environments was a true differentiator.
Prototyping
Co-Design and Rapid Iterations
The results of the concept testing sessions gave us confidence to nail down the core workflow that focused on educating and instilling confidence.
Iteration 1
The first iteration focused on establishing the foundation – blocking out the flow and layout of each workflow step.
Iteration 2
The second iteration filled in intermediate steps and specific layout options were explored and tested.
Iteration 3
The third iteration was explored in high fidelity, ensuring that we've optimized content and visual clarity.
Final Designs
Customers can easily reference details on existing configurations and understand how their sites are affected.
Customers can easily view differences from older versions and restore their configurations to the desired state.
Customers have a guide for each step of a new configuration – simplifying the process and teaching them along the way.
Results
Our final product choices resonated well with customers. While the bar was initially set low compared to the old workflow of submitting support tickets, our customers reported significant time savings with the introduction of this product. More importantly, they expressed increased confidence and a sense of control.
"This tool just saves us so much time."
Manager of Web Development
Shalini A.
"The test environments allow my team to do more. We have some ideas that we don't even ask for because we know it's going to be applied directly to Live."
Sr. Director of Digital Engineering
L.A. Adams
"Absolutely need this. This treatment is something different and I haven't seen in comparable products."
Manager of Web Development
B. Truong