Monitor Overview
Microsoft Azure
Over 900% increase in usage of video tutorials by Azure Monitor users, within 3 months of launch, with an additional 20% uptick in usage across Application, VM and Container insights services over 6 months.
Worked closely with PM, User Researchers and developers to quickly design, validate and deploy the feature, using Figma prototypes for rapid iteration and validation.
Client
Microsoft Inc., Azure, Application Insights
Role
Senior User Experience Designer
Location
On-sight, remote
Scope
To help Azure Monitor customers to quickly gain access to educational materials, to drive growth of “Insights” services and to provide more efficient access to popular Monitoring tools.
Challenge
The Azure Monitor team had a dilemma: users were often seeking information about Azure’s Monitoring capabilities from sources other than Azure, such as YouTube, or Google searches.
Also, the Monitor / Overview section I had designed years prior was successful in driving users to the featured services, but several others were not represented by the three main links, reducing visibility and usage. Plus, the page’s “Quick Start” section, and the What’s new and Tutorials & Demos tabs, had low usage numbers as well.
Action
A Senior PM and I conducted calls with top customers to confirm that video tutorials were the preferred learning method, but many users didn’t find the videos we hosted in Azure. I explored various UX concepts to increase engagement with our educational materials and provide quick access to popular Monitoring services, especially the “Insights” products for Applications, Containers, and Virtual Machines.
One approach was to imbed videos for the Insights products directly on the page and use a list view for the remaining services (utilizing the already existing “Insights hub” layout).
Another approach placed greater emphasis on the Insights Services videos, while directing all other content to the Insights Hub via a button link beneath the page description. While this layout retained some of the original Overview page's structure, it overly diminished the visibility of non-Insights content.
A third concept introduced description cards for the remaining services, featuring action oriented titles, and a video link for each. I also organized the content into logical groupings using accordion-style chevrons, allowing users to collapse sections that weren’t relevant to their role. I shared this design with our Developers, who said that embedding multiple videos would cause potential slow page loading times, so I came up with another approach for the final result.
My final design features info cards with short descriptions for all sections, with a link to “view” the service to start using it. I also added a “more” info link to open a context pane with a longer description, links to educational materials and a short, informative overview video. I moved tabs closer to the card sections, where they had better visibility, particularly for Tutorials and What’s new (see video below).
Post-launch telemetry showed a more than 900% increase in usage of video tutorials by Azure Monitor users, within 3 months of launch, with an additional 20% uptick in usage across Application, VM and Container insights services over 6 months.