Software Does Not Work Well When People Don’t Know How to Use It

Of course, that’s common sense. But what we found from users when showing them concepts and videos of IBM Cloud Paks were:

1. Initial Training is Weak or Non-Existent

   • Many have experienced training from Cloud providers that involves limited relevancy to their company needs, making training less effective. Others have been frustrated that their own company does not adequately support training.

2. People are Slow to Adopt to New Software & Companies Move Too Quickly

   • Companies struggle convincing their teams to use new software tools as many people become resistant to learning. On-boarding has become frustrating and executives or top management have to force full adoption across multiple teams. Other times, companies tend to move forward with the newest or latest technology without fully understanding how to use it.

   • “I feel like we are moving too fast. This is the latest, greatest thing, let's try it out. And they sort of understand it but then they don't and they push everyone to use it. I think I feel like people don't gain enough knowledge behind something that they're trying to push on to other people and their trying to always stay up to date with the latest technology.” - Engineer

3. Cloud Companies Over-Simplify Adoption & Create Difficult On-Boarding

   • Many participants believed that cloud companies intentionally promote complexity into their products, in addition to the on-boarding process, so charges can be made towards setting and managing the systems. Also, demos tend to be useless or vague.

4. Cloud Companies Forget About the Daily User

   • Numerous participants felt that once a deal is reached, they are forgotten or ghosted by cloud companies for on-going training and updates on those products. Some felt that cloud companies don’t work closely enough with actual users to develop the products and it shows.

   • “The software companies after they struck a deal with the organization, they kind of put us on the side a little bit in terms of keeping us updated with the new releases and new developments.” - Business Analysts

Participant’s Views

Participants confessed that staying on task and project completion is a moving target for them. Because of too many cooks in the kitchen, it's harder to focus and maintain work. The tools themselves make work harder with issues, such an increase in alerts, notifications, dashboards and multiple windows opened across software tools.

During the diary study, participants tracked their work for 4 consecutive days.

• On average, each participant lost track of what they were doing at least twice each day.

• Each participant had at least 3 meetings per day.

• On a weekly basis, participants had to check across 6 different dashboards. The highest number for a single individual was 25.

Blockers that participants came up with:

• too many meetings

• troubleshooting tickets took up more time than expected

• QA problems with features

• asked to help out on another team’s feature

• learning new material slowed down progress (e.g. using docs to figure out a configuration set up)

• unable to find the contact person for a specific project or the ticket owner on another team to get questions answered

• team members too busy to help

• communication problems with other teams causing too much back and forth and no decision -making

• team not on the same page about a project

Recommendations for the Design/Engineer Team

1. Help recover sessions

   • Ensure that time outs and switching screens don’t cause work to be completely lost as it is likely that users will be lost as they switch to different tools or other tasks. Also, have a reminder for users on what steps they have completed so they can remember where they left off.

2. Avoid useless alerts across multiple tools

   • Consider how to aggregate and/or control alerting so that it doesn’t clutter chat spaces and in boxes with false positives and duplication.

3. Offer clickable alerts for a quick troubleshooting

   • Alerts should get users right to the problem. Consider how alerts can direct users to the place where they can get the most done in understanding the problem quickly. Users want a direct link to a useful view, not simply landing on a dashboard. Connecting alerts to logs was high on the wish list.

4. Offer clean and clear dashboards

   • Always assume that dashboards will be viewed in the company from other screens and tools. Users need to orient themselves quickly and refer back easily e.g. important things need to jump out, the order should be logical and good descriptions are crucial.

5. Make Searching and Querying Logs Consistent and Simple

   • Logs continue to be a huge pain point which means no one company has nailed it. Simple searching that doesn’t require a lot of inputs and a consistent way to query across tools are two ways to ease a very laborious experience.

6. If possible, the less, the better

   • Cloud software tools are proliferating and users are struggling to learn them all and keep track of them. Whenever is is possible to have fewer tools with more functionality, users would rather learn one thing, know how it works and move on to getting work done.

7. Integrate Paks with other communications tools to help teammates

   • By integrating with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and other platforms, we can help ensure that alerts, notifications, updates and any other communication is received and used by entire teams.

8. Offer training inside the software tools

• For on-boarding, consider adding tool tips and guidance that can be turned off and on at any given time to accommodate employee turn-over

• Offer hover states or tool tips for definitions of terminology for new or current users working across tools and platforms.