UX for DevOps
How do we build user experiences to support the work of a DevOps team? What is similar to classic HCI, and what parts do we need to rethink?
When I was trained in HCI, our usual scenarios involved fairly naive users who were entering a domain of expertise, and following a fairly well-trodden path. For example, Expedia probably knows a lot more about buying plane tickets than I do, and there's a fairly common route from picking a trip, to picking a ticket, to paying for it.
In contrast, DevOps users:
- Are domain experts, with rich understandings of their systems
- Have a model of their system far richer than can be sent through telemetry and configuration
- Have the power to adjust the data that they send
- Are often asking questions that have never been asked before
- Are sometimes called to make decisions under incredible time pressure
- Work collaboratively to make sense of complex systems and challenges.
The Core Analysis Loop
How do users solve mysteries? I watched dozens of users in action, and documented the Core Analysis Loop to find unifying themes.
BubbleUp
How can users quickly identify why their system is failing? How quickly can we narrow down on the anomalous data? BubbleUp uses core visualization techniques to help identify which dimensions are different — even with Honeycomb's high-dimensionality, high-cardinality datasets.
I wrote a blog entry about creating BubbleUp "BubbleUp: Supporting DevOps With Data Visualization," in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 99-105, 1 Jan.-Feb. 2021, doi: 10.1109/MCG.2020.3024039.