Cloudbees SDM (Apps)

During the discovery process, our team gathered all of the intel from competitors that conducted the apps marketplace experience right. These companies were the likes of Slack, GitHub, Apple, SalesForce, Splunk, and many others. The design team focused heavily on specific problem areas that our users would face when trying to integrate an app with the SDM platform. We wanted to make sure we understood the main problems they faced before beginning the design of our own. We conducted multiple sessions asking users what they would expect when integrating GitHub to the SDM. What challenges would they come across in other products they have used? What are some examples of nice experiences they have faced? We consumed these responses and started to form an ideal scenario flow based on our findings. These were in the form of initial wire-frames that were reviewed thoroughly with stakeholders, and the users we were keeping an open conversation with. We found that keeping the experience as simple as possible assisted and maintained the ease of use our users were looking for. We started by focusing on one app that would then inform how other apps are installed and configured.

GitHub was our guinea pig in this scenario. Since GitHub needs configuration via API and re-direct, we tested our UI against some of the technical implications where the user is met with an outside configuration screen. We decided that a modal is the best situation as we can keep the experience within our product and we thoroughly validated these screens with our pool of users before moving into production. During implementation, we found that the high fidelity designs informed the team enough to take the work we did on the GitHub flows and utilize the patterns across all of the current app offerings we wanted to deliver. Of course, the validation never stops so we conducted a few more un-moderated sessions via usertesting.com and focused heavily on real-world examples inside the production app. We found that a few individuals were struggling with the integrations in GitHub because there was an issue with adding multiple GitHub accounts on one SDM account, which informed our next round of revisions to include a picker when the user has multiple GitHub accounts to be added. This was a really fun feature to work on, and its constantly being improved via feedback from customers.