My role
I led the design of this feature for ADEM (Autonomous Digital Experience Management) early this year. ADEM is an offering by Palo Alto Networks that offers segment-wise insights for complete visibility, operational efficiency, and the user experience to diagnose network issues.
This feature marked a significant transition for ADEM’s offering as an end-to-end tool for custom diagnosing issues and pinpointing causes of poor performance for applications.
Customer Insights and Ideation
I partnered with three product managers at Palo Alto Networks and one product manager at Zoom to uncover insights obtained from the research, and translate concepts into features to address customer pain points and behavior.
Experience Strategy and Vision
Created a framework and prototypes to share the vision and design principles and content strategy. This helped evangelize ideas and gain alignment across the platform, and a roadmap for having unique application dashboards was laid.
Planning and Scope Definition
I defined the product with product manager partners. I evangelized customer goals and balanced them with business goals. I prioritized and negotiated features for launch and beyond.
Oversight and Coordination
I collaborated with one other designer to translate product features.
Design Execution and Validation
I executed journeys, wireframes, prototypes, and design specs.
Leadership
I presented work to gain buy-in from executives, senior stakeholders, and many other teams throughout the project lifecycle.
Final prototype
Pre-integration with Zoom data
The problem
Remote work is set to expand substantially following the end of the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Research reveals that 75 percent of employees expect more organizations to offer remote work after the pandemic comes to an end. Fully remote workers earn more than non-remote workers and reported higher rates of job satisfaction and retention compared to non-remote workers.
Challenges Created by Highly Distributed Environments
No doubt, these highly distributed environments are far more complex than they were in the past. According to research, 75% of organizations believe that their IT environments are more complex than they were just two years ago.
Users
Networking teams
Usually 5x4 members
UCaaS teams
Usually 5 members
Research
Other insights from research
Lack of comprehensive control and visibility into all components of the service delivery path including device, Wi-Fi, home router, ISP path, applications, and internet traffic.
Together, these factors have contributed to extended troubleshooting times, loss of productivity (think of the influx of help desk tickets from users), and poor user experiences.
Existing solutions used for network monitoring, endpoint monitoring, and application monitoring provide siloed visibility into their respective domains, but lack the context of the overall environment, making it difficult to troubleshoot effectively. Consequently, organizations began turning to digital experience management (DEM) solutions.
Moments in the life of a Network Admin
Vision
Segment-wise Insights
Operations teams must be able to view every segment in the application delivery path for all users - in branch, home, or remote locations.
Expedited Troubleshooting
In a single pane of glass, ADEM must provide comprehensive visibility that aids Zoom to substantially reduce the time to identify potential issues and then remediate them.
Comprehensive Monitoring
ADEM must collect and monitor data from endpoint devices (including CPU, memory utilization, and Wi-Fi statistics), leveraging both real user traffic and synthetic tests to provide a holistic view of the entire distributed environment.
Breaking down the problem
Long term roadmap
While ADEM (Autonomous Digital Experience Management) already offers segment-wise insights on application performance, this could immediately be extended to other SaaS applications like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex.
In the long run, this opens a dialogue for customizing insights for complex applications like Figma, Salesforce, Tableau, Photoshop, and Microsoft suite of products.
What is the end goal for Zoom?
The pandemic marked a surge in Zoom usage that led to an increase in the volume of calls that gave rise to call quality issues like delays, interference, interruptions, disconnections, and more. Zoom wanted to gain insight into specific call quality data, view trends categorized by audio, video, and screen-sharing.
Keeping in mind…
How many Zoom calls?
Zoom Metrics to help measure call quality
Zoom admins can enable meeting quality scores or network alerts on the Dashboard for meetings and webinars.
The quality score of the meeting is based on the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) which ranges from 1 to 5 for a meeting’s quality between bad to good. Network alerts and quality scores for audio, video, and screen sharing will be displayed on the Meetings and Webinar dashboard. Zoom will use default values for network alerts.
Alternatively, admins can set custom thresholds to trigger network alerts related to audio, video, screen sharing, and CPU usage. These alerts will be shown on the Dashboard.
Summary of performance impact
Zoom overview
Number of Zoom meetings in the past month
Average QoS in the past month
Number of users in Zoom meetings in the past month (total users)
Number of minutes in Zoom meetings across the organization
% of Zoom meetings in which users experienced a significant call quality issue (Poor MOS)
User root cause breakdown
Breakdown of users experiencing issues, poor performing meetings by root cause
Device
Local Network
Internet
Prisma Access
Application
Number of minutes impacted
Number of impacted users
Number of impacted meetings
Root cause details
Suggested remediation
Breakdown of issues by
- Audio
- Video
- Screen sharing
User issues
User name (Link to user page)
Number of impacted meetings
Root cause wit details
Suggested remediation
Ensuring scalability
Empty state - Timeframe of a timeframe
Challenges working with an external team
Aggressive scope
Scope increased drastically midway through the project
Fixed launch date
Launch date was fixed despite the increase in scope due to the Zoomtopia 2022 conference coming up and leadership commitment to deliver
To avoid this, I started creating documentation to help alleviate the data crutch and better articulate and distribute design rationale. Doing this was time-consuming but saved a lot of back and forth as the project progressed.
Design principles and feedback from the Zoom team helped to create visibility into my design process and galvanize the team to share the vision for unique dashboards for each monitored app.
Feedback
Managing feedback was even more challenging and felt like a swinging pendulum of viewpoints
ADEM was able to quickly identify the issue and alert users within seconds of the problem occurring, mitigating user frustration and stemming the potential loss of productivity.
