Cruise is building the world's most advanced self-driving vehicles to safely connect people with the places, things, and experiences they care about.
DATE
June 20th - July 29th, 2022 (6 weeks)
TEAM
User Researcher (Danielle Jo), Senior Software Engineers, Engineering Manager, Product Manager, Senior User Researcher
OVERVIEW
Sentinel is the tool that deploys tablet applications to the AV. The premise behind the tool is to understand what apps are deployed to different fleets, cars, and devices in autonomous vehicles. Since Engineering resources are limited, we explored updating the user experience of Sentinel so that the Operations team can use the tool for application deployment without further support from the engineering team.
As a User researcher, I focused on defining the problem space, engaging the right users for contextual interviews, creating the journey map, analyzing the qualitative data, providing the process and feature insights, and delivering the key findings to enhance the UX.
Highlights
OBJECTIVE
Enable the Operators to self-serve the app deployment process and reduce the support from the software engineering team on tool education.
TOOLS
Sentinel (Internal fleet operations tool), Zoom, Hangout, G Suite, Figma
CHALLENGES
Finding Sentinel users within the organization, learning the technical terms and acronyms used on the tool, designing the scope of research.
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
Uncovered the users of Sentinel and defined their stories and user personas that use the tool regularly.
Tracked down the issues that are generating redundant communication between engineering and operations.
Developed the user journey and determined all the necessary and unnecessary features for design change.
RESEARCH IMPACT
Shared with the research team, engineering team, and the senior product manager on the current issues.
Engaged the design team to upgrade the user experience based on the insights and recommendations found.
Challenges of application deployment
Sentinel is an internal tool that assists with new app deployment on tablets inside autonomous vehicles. Though it was a crucial tool for managing a large number of fleets at once, the tool was designed based on the need of the engineering team. This confused the Sentinel users, the majority of them being non-technical operators, on how to use the tool, what they can do with it, and even who exactly is using the features and functions. Before the chaos becomes bigger with a larger number of fleets coming into operation, the research team explored how we can enhance Sentinel user experience to lessen the confusion and allow operators to use the tool easily.
Research question
“How can we improve Sentinel to allow the Operators to self-serve the app deployment process?”
Subsequent research goals
Create a shared understanding of the different user stories and contexts and align how users understand, describe and think of the tool.
Identify the friction points in the current Sentinel user experience and visualize the features that are needed or have to be deprecated.
Research process
Please reach out for further details of the research process :)
The final presentation shared with the internal tools engineering, product, design, and research team.
I was featured in their commercial advertisement (00:12) 😀
Reflections
The internal tools criticalities: Cruise relies heavily on both the hardware and software. On top of the growing number of autonomous vehicles in operation, hundreds of engineers and operators are communicating through the tool itself, and the number will soon go up to thousands. Cruise would need solidified internal tools as much as they want the physical cars to deliver a prominent user experience.
Aligning what we know and what we don't know: It is a researcher’s role to probe the questions raised by the researchers ourselves and the stakeholders. Nevertheless, it is also a researcher’s role to align every stakeholder and involved participant to be aware of the emerging areas where people are unaware of being on the same page.
Engaging to enable!: By proactively engaging with the engineers and operators throughout the research process, it is beneficial for all involved stakeholders and users to be enabled on the product status.