Enhancing User Research Through Visual Snapshots at Octopus Deploy 🚀

At Octopus Deploy, we're transforming our understanding of customer needs by leveraging user research visualizations to cultivate empathy and guide our product development.

1. Fostering a Collaborative Research Environment 🤝

In our approach to user research, we prioritize inclusivity and collaboration within our team. By keeping discovery sessions open to all team members, we create an environment that encourages engagement and ensures everyone is well-informed about customer insights. Typically, these sessions are scheduled on a shared calendar and communicated through our Slack channel, inviting colleagues to participate as their schedules allow.

This collaborative effort not only enriches the findings but also allows for diverse perspectives to emerge during discussions. Product managers and designers typically lead interviews; however, having the entire team involved fosters collective understanding and drives empathy for our customers’ experiences.

2. Utilizing the Double Diamond Framework for Comprehensive Exploration 🔍

Our research strategy employs the Double Diamond framework, which consists of two phases: discovery and development. In the initial phase, we brainstorm broadly, exploring a wide array of customer needs and challenges. This exploration is crucial in filling knowledge gaps and informing subsequent decisions.

Once we gather insights from our interviews and investigations, we narrow our focus to specific pain points that need addressing. This structured approach, characterized by divergent and convergent thinking, ensures that our development efforts are aligned with genuine user needs.

Visually representing our findings has proven particularly beneficial for complex projects. Visual snapshots help convey interview summaries in a digestible format, aiding our team in grasping the multifaceted perspectives of our users. This method enhances understanding and fosters a deeper connection to the challenges customers face.

3. Targeted Research Outreach for Valuable Feedback 📊

In this project, we specifically targeted users who already engage with features such as config as code and runbooks. This overlap provided a fertile ground for collecting meaningful feedback. Our outreach efforts began with a mass email campaign aimed at recruiting participants from this intersection of user functionalities.

Additionally, we are exploring alternative strategies, such as creating a customer advisory board and incentivizing regular feedback sessions. Emphasizing the influence users can wield over the development of the runbooks as code feature is a key motivator for their participation. We understand that engaging software engineers can be challenging given their priorities, but capturing feedback during active usage moments is essential for obtaining high-quality insights.

4. Utilizing Research Findings for Informed Development 🔧

Our team faced a unique challenge as many of the original developers for the runbook feature had transitioned to other roles, leaving us without their insights. However, conducting thorough user research allowed us to uncover critical information regarding how customers interact with runbooks and the obstacles they encounter in their workflows.

The knowledge gained from this discovery phase was not only pivotal for our current initiative, but it also facilitated a broader understanding of the significance of runbooks within the company. Sharing this insight across departments has helped align teams on understanding customer needs and the associated jobs to be done.

As we synthesized our findings, we documented every insight, combining customer research with industry and competitive analysis. The latter, while not visually presented, informs our understanding of market dynamics and trends. This comprehensive research output guides our decision-making, ensuring that our design efforts in the second phase of development are focused on the most pressing user needs.

5. Moving Forward with Empathy and Insight 🌟

The insights derived from our user research are now utilized to refine our product features actively. Engaging with users and capturing their feedback during relevant interactions has positioned us to make informed decisions that resonate with customer needs.

By harnessing visual snapshots, we enhance transparency in our processes and foster a greater sense of empathy across the team. Our commitment to understanding the user experience drives our development efforts and ultimately contributes to delivering a product that meets and exceeds customer expectations.

Moving forward, we remain dedicated to refining our research processes, exploring new methods of engagement, and ensuring that every development consideration is rooted in the authentic needs of our users. Our ultimate goal is to create features that not only serve functionality but also facilitate user satisfaction and success.