Sauce Labs provides a platform of tools for the functional testing of web and mobile applications.
The platform’s main web interface is the Test Results Workflow: a series of screens for locating, analyzing and taking steps to resolve errors found by our four main products.
Each product was built by a separate team, with different ways of displaying and interacting with what was a very similar underlying pattern.
multiple variations of the same pattern
The Challenge
A Broken Primary Workflow
Over its twelve-year lifespan, Sauce Labs’ original product had expanded into multiple products and features built by siloed agile teams. As a result, the user experience for Sauce Labs’ most highly used feature — Test Results — wasn’t optimal for our biggest cohort of users, QA’s (testers) and SDET’s (engineers) working in test.
For instance: large customers like Walmart ran thousands of automated tests each night, but the Test Results page only showed the last 50 tests. To view additional test results, users had to go to the Archives page.
Additionally, the Insights and Builds pages had useful information that wasn't available on the results pages, nor was it easy to navigate between these helpful views. Users had to remember which test they were drilling into.
the pages in the workflow were not connected well
My role
When I joined as the Head of Product Design, Sauce Labs had undergone major changes. The new executives decided to pivot to a product-led growth strategy, which involved increasing adoption of our tools by developers.
I hypothesized that an overhaul of test results would result in a better product for both our current users as well as developers, and unifying the disparate UX patterns would be critical to the scalability of our platform over time.
Additionally, there had been layoffs that included most of the design team. While I led the initiative to overhaul test results, I was also rebuilding the design org, and gradually stepped back as I brought on new hires.
With all the new eyes and energy directed at our 12 year-old product, we craved a more robust design system. By focusing on Test Results, we would be covering the most challenging and important design patterns first.
A Complication
Who Owns Web Testing?
Looking at our org chart, there was a team to support our new focus on the Developer Experience and there were dedicated teams for each of the different kinds of testing we supported at the time except for one glaring omission...
There was no single team that owned the UX of our original offering - Web Testing. This would have been the most logical team to partner with to improve Test Results.
The same was true for the cross-platform experience.
Everyone agreed we needed to improve Test Results, but none of our agile teams were incentivized to work on it.
The Process
Making it Work
USING the sailboat exercise to assess the current state
Luckily, the members of the DevX (Developer Experience) team became our allies. Their goal was to increase the usage of our product by developers and, like the design team, they knew we had to provide a better workflow using Test Results to track down bugs.
Their idea to "just make it like Cypress" was not completely off track: we certainly studied Cypress as well as other tools developers use every day.
But Discovery involves more than looking around, it means looking within, not just to capture the "as is" state of the product, but to understand how it got that way in first place. We used the sailboat exercise which helped turn us away from comparing our product to other products, which can only get you so far.
The Solution
What We Achieved
Conclusion
Inspired by fixing a workflow that mattered to the largest cohort of our users, I successfully brought disparate teams together to implement this and other cross-platform initiatives.
When leadership changed in mid 2023, the new executives turned to the design team to provide a Meta Analysis of our users, their journeys and the future possibilities of our platform. I was gone at the time, but I'm proud of the fact that my designers could convey this in a way no one else in Product could.
In my mind, it was proof that I had succeeded at my goal of developing designers as business-informed, product-thinkers, who can communicate the big picture while sweating the details.
About Brenda
I started working in software as a QA tester part time to support myself as a professional dancer. Testing led to coding, prototyping, animating and writing for software products as well.
I started a design agency with fellow UX designers and ran that company for over 15 years. Clients included Walmart, Verizon, Autodesk, Hyatt Hotels, Cox Automotive, Applied Biosystems, Sony, Intuit and PG&E.
These days, I bring my years of broad experience to lead design “in house," where my penchant for improving systems and communications can impact not only the end users, but the teams creating those impactful experiences as well.
My team at Sauce Labs had low turnover and gave me the highest score on employee satisfaction surveys.
Everything I do should be in service of someone else
Assume positive intent
Focus on what we can do versus what we can’t
Time and psychological safety are vital to the creative process
So is a sense of humor
When speculation is put forward as fact, ask “is that true”?
Give recognition and thanks often and in public
Help my team grow as professional software makers and rising leaders themselves
"A key contribution of design is creating a context in which people can think.
Alongside final deliverables, clarity, insight and inspiration should be regularly delivered as well."
— Brenda Stine
Brenda Stine
Product Design Leader
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