Smart IT

Opportunities from Observations

Six months into my time at BMC, I was asked to be part of a vision project to learn about the current state of the art in the IT Service Management (ITSM) industry. BMC had a dominant product, Remedy, that had fallen out of favor due to dwindling innovation and dreadful user experiences.

Out in the field, we discovered teams of IT agents fighting with their tools. Remedy and competing products were seen more of hindrances than assistive tools. Agents—people who had gone into IT to help people solve problems—were constantly distracted from their work by clunky and slow interfaces. Post-it notes with reminders and gotchas were pasted around the bezels of monitors. Binders filled with training materials were piled up on desks, never to be touched by time-strapped agents. And most revealing of all, many agents would start by typing details of customers’ issues on Notepad, only to go to Remedy and log tickets about the work at the very end of the process. Clearly, there were many opportunities for improvement.

We conducted several weeks of contextual inquiries with large and small customers. From this work, we developed three main Service Desk personas as the targets for the first phase of whatever this project would become.

Before & After

Smart Recorder

Seeing agents type basic information about their customers and their IT issues and later copy all of that into Remedy tickets made it clear that there could be a better solution. ITSM tools are usually form-based, meaning that agents need to match up their thought processes with a rigid series of ticket fields. This process usually led to incomplete or inaccurate inputs and increased the time to resolve issues.

What if agents could just describe the issue and never have to worry about filing tickets? This premise stuck with me and later became the driving spark behind Smart Recorder, an assistive interface that surfaces contextual information about the customer’s past tickets, provides access to knowledge resources from the same screen, and even suggests courses of action for expediently addressing the issue.

Bringing all of this functionality into a simple experience took many iterations to get right. The customer needed to be identified in order to seed all search results, so I designed a flow that first required the customer to be found via search. Another issue was the layout—while we started with a two-column design, this raised many interaction issues and required the agent to toggle between multiple layers. I worked with our engineering team to prototype a new design with three main sections, which ultimately stuck through to the shipping feature.

Before & After

Ticket Views

Despite the limited amount of time for this early design work—just a few weeks’ time—we poured through mountains of ideas for how to present and display ticket information.

A desire to show the chronological history of a ticket morphed into the Activity Stream, a fundamental piece of all tickets that resides in the right column of the layout. Resources were another big part of the product vision, providing the ability to "pin" helpful knowledge articles and similar issue tickets to an incident so that they could be pulled up later, all without having to spawn a popup window or dialog box.

Before & After

Dashboard

We tested multiple concepts for what to show to agents when they first entered Smart IT. Traditionally, ITSM tools would show some kind of dashboard of meaningless charts intended more for executives than the Service Desk. I saw an opportunity to deliver workspaces and tools for each distinct persona, so that a Level 1 Service Agent would see different things from a Field Technician who is always on-the-go. Over time, we whittled the design down to a series of sections to show the health of the Service Desk.

Building with R&D

At its height, the Smart IT team included our small design team and over 40 others—product managers, architects, developers, QA engineers, and documentation authors. We had about a month of lead time before R&D began their work implementing our designs.

To better facilitate working together, I pushed for a regular cadence of UX shareout meetings and a collaborative attitude towards the rest of the team. I scheduled working sessions between our designers, architects, product managers, and UI developer leads. These became a hallmark of the Smart IT design and development process.

At the beginning of the project, we settled on using a UX spec document to share annotated mockups, icon libraries, and the design principles. This morphed into a gigantic, 500-page tome that quickly fell out of date. Frustrated by this process, I eventually moved the team over to using Sketch and InVision to share interactive prototypes for each Smart IT user story. This was a significant process improvement that later moved across to other BMC projects.