Task Monitoring Panel

Unbuckle a hidden behavior to facilitate task monitoring

My Contribution
I led the redesign of the task monitoring experience, with both an easy-implemented short-term solution and a usability-elevated long-term vision. We also introduced an elegant template and guideline with a 100% improvement in customer satisfaction.
Duration
Sep 2022 - Dec 2022
Team
UX designer, PM, Software Engineer
Problem

Task monitoring panel is a component that is used across all the vmware cloud products. It will be triggered whenever asynchronous tasks take place. The current issues with its usage were reported by an engineer, who sought assistance with two specific concerns:

Root cause

After reading through all the doc and digging into the design system and demo of the component, I discovered that the problem was not like how it was described. There is actually a dismiss button already but it was hidden under the title of each task, so in order to dismiss a task, the user needs to click on the task and enter the Detail View to take any further action.
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Imagine you have 3 ongoing tasks that block your screen, you have to click 6 times in order to get the elements beneath reveal. And the task history is achieved surprisingly through a dedicated sidebar navigation tab. Since this behavior is so unintuitive that none of the people noticed the usage even the engineer who reported the problem in the first place, it makes me concerned if users are also bothered by the usage consistently.

Short-term solution
I understand that any big change happens progressively so I tackled this problem with two approaches. One short-term with minimal engineering effort and one Northstar vision to really improve the experience.
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Since the secondary detail view of a task is not info-dense at all, with two actions and one optional subtask message, I tried to simplify the information hierarchy into one level. The dismiss button would be aggregated altogether to alleviate the burden when the user wants to interact with the elements beneath. But Cancel would still be assigned to each single task.Multiple clicks in order to get your job done now condensed into 1 click!

Long-term vision
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For the Northstar approach, my consideration is that the task can be perceived as one kind of notification, so I first came up with the design to add another section in the current notification panel, however, it was quickly confirmed by the dev team that it’s not feasible due to the data fetching limitation.
A quick iteration is made by leveraging the existing notification component and create a task panel similar to the notification panel.
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To further improve the usability of the task panel and A/B test user preference, I conducted moderated interviews with 10 internal and external experts well-versed in our product. The purpose was to gather insights on their perception of the new task monitoring method.

7 out of 10 expressed a preference for a dedicated task panel over the current floating one. They cited concerns about inadvertently closing the floating panel and losing track of tasks. However, the remaining 3 users favored the current setup, valuing its flexibility that allow them to work on other tasks concurrently while monitoring progress.
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Given system operations often involve time-consuming processes, it’s imperative for users to stay informed about task progress while juggling other tasks. In response to this feedback, a "PIN" button has been introduced to address the inconsistency associated with the on-and-off nature of the panel. This addition aims to provide users with the flexibility to toggle between a persistent display and the option to minimize the panel, catering to both preferences for focused monitoring and multitasking capability.

I was concerned about the "PIN" button at first due to potential resistance from developers. However, during a weekly share-out meeting involving the entire Design Organization, I was relieved to discover that the "PIN" button functionality is already in use within the "Support" feature, suggesting that a straightforward implemention can be expected!
Takeaways

01. Communication is very critical if not the most critical thing.
There are no right people of contact in a large organization who know everything. Everyone knows a fraction of the entire ecosystem. The more people I talked to, the more fractions linked, and the epiphany clicked when the puzzles were put together.

02. Proper documentation is a good helper.
We tend to overtrust our memory but when the project lasts long, it’s such a great thing to have structured documentation. I took meeting notes along the project and found it such a good helper in reminding me of the reasoning behind the decisions.