Case Study: DevOps

Implementing The DevOps Methodology in Exchange Quality

Overview

Product Summary

The Exchange Quality team at Index Exchange sits at the epicenter of the digital exchange, communicating with both clients and partners to ensure all programmatic advertising delivery meets business needs and quality standards. Through the implementation of a DevOps methodology, all organizational silos are broken down to increase both communication and collaboration to help ensure product features are continuing to evolve and improve at a faster pace than before.

Problem Statement

From the point a digital advertisement enters the exchange to the point it is delivered to its targeted user it must first go through a rigorous human-reviewal process to ensure it not only aligns with company and business values but meets the quality standards and expectations of our clients and end-users. Although, Index Exchange as a company employs DevOps methodologies in its product life cycle it does not with the Exchange Quality department. This is due to the thick siloed walls between departments, much-needed features that would benefit all parties takes longer than anticipated to develop and implement.

Solution

By implementing the same DevOps methodology that is currently being used in our Product department into the Exchange Quality department we can produce a more efficient way of communicating newly proposed features. As a result, this change would also successfully increase the speed at which changes can be implemented, resulting in better serving our clients and partners while also becoming more effective in the process.

Tools

Confluence, Jira, TeamWork, Illustrator, Photoshop

Role

I was the project lead of a Confluence redesign project that aimed at improving the way vital information was being stored and shared among teams. During this project I also played the roles of both User Researcher and UX Designer to ensure the final product increased collaboration and communication while elevating the overall user experience for employees.

Research

Initial Research

Our Confluence space was originally used as merely a place to house important documentation for employees to reference to complete their daily tasks. Although the information itself was important, the main problem I discovered was that it wasn’t designed in a way that was easy to navigate for employees of the Exchange Quality department or other departments. When assigned to completely redesign our Confluence space as a project, there were three immediate questions I wanted to answer.

How many people are currently using this space within Exchange Quality?
What departments would benefit from the information posted to this space?
How can I redesign this space to increase the user experience of its main users, while making it more accessible to other departments?

To begin answering these questions, I conducted an analysis of the user views of each page to assess which pages were being used and by which teams. Additionally, I also conducted an audit of all the documentation posted within the space, which included 84 pages in total. This led me to discover that many of the pages were not only unused but included outdated pages that could be archived.

User Interviews

My next stage of research was conducting user interviews with team members from other departments that work closely with the Exchange Quality team to discover what information they could benefit from accessing more readily. Also important was documenting their pain points with the current space to help me better understand the issues.

During my user interviews, I discovered an additional problem that was being caused by the silos and current design, which was that it was becoming increasingly difficult to request and develop new features for the team’s internal proprietary tools. This was leading employees to be out of the loop for current feature request development and issues with new releases were not funneling back to the appropriate teams quick enough.

With all this information gathered, I developed categories I could use to improve the information architecture of the space and shared a card sorting exercise with employees to assess the selected categories’ accuracy and to locate any gaps.

Design

Solving The Problem With Design

Using the results from both the user interviews and the card sorting exercise I redesigned the space with a page tree that more accurately organized the information into categories that were easily identified by both internal and external teams. In addition to addressing issues with the previous information architecture, I also built and implemented a dashboard that not only displayed Jira tickets statuses for feature requests but also displayed DOMO analytics for business teams to monitor.

Final Result

Once the redesign of the new Confluence space was published I monitored the page views and discovered that not only were more employees within Exchange Quality were now visiting more of the pages than before. A large percentage of the views were coming from other departments that were now able to answer questions they had on a daily basis, without having to email team members to find out. The dashboard was also now the most viewed page in the entire space and was being used by employees to increase collaboration on feature requests and share any issues with new releases.

In summary, the new Confluence space was so successful that it led the executive team to push the changes across all the departments in the company to model their confluence spaces after the one I had developed.