Kentik Technologies Context

Kentik specializes in network visibility observability and analytics. The SaaS platform helps users monitor and analyze their network traffic in real-time. Kentik's platform provides insights into network performance, security, and capacity planning.

Team & Tools

Our product design team included four product designers plus a design manager. We all worked cross-functionally, leading different product verticals and contributing to the product’s overall UX function and product market fit.

Working on continuous release this project included collaborating with engineering, design, SME’s, SDRs, internal and external users, and company stakeholders.

Project Intro

A large part of the product design role at Kentik is socializing UX value among the org, pushing forward product market fit, and adding adoption among customers. One of the tasked verticals is to become an expert in the product and pitch ideas to increase its value.

In this task, I explored our internal Pendo analytics, segments, drop off rates, and customer retention. This led to grooming, adding, and tagging features/segments and learning about our customers with the help of Salesforce Integration and our backend data.

This needed to be scoped to a single area, so we began with general trial onboarding, and who and how users access/adopt our product.

Process

Trial Onboarding Current State

• Take away: 26 page trial onboarding process

• Pendo analytics show 97% drop off rate after second page

• Trial onboarding experience broke 9/10 usability heuristics

• When talking with internal CSEs (Customer Success Engineers) and customers, it was noted that due to the complexity and length of this workflow, after a contract is won, CSEs will configure the product for our customers to ease the burden.

User Journey & Heuristic Evaluation

Segments & Analytics

Priority Matrix and Road Map

Needs

I want an easily digestible trial experience. I want a quick glance that doest put me through a tedious onboarding. I want to try out how the product works without compromising my data and grow if I want to. I don’t have time to learn a bunch of new things for this product- I want the product to show me.

Ideation - Drop in Trial Experience

This idea would allow users to trial a specific area of Kentik, pinpointing the need, rather than showing the entire product suite. We saw competitors offer a similar experience and our users had expressed interest in this type of experience.

With the Beta experience, Kentik Synthetics, a user could put in any URL and Kentik would use our ASNs to test page load, reachability, and Hops. The user would also be able to add in their email for a trial, we would verify and create a 30 day account for them, allowing them to see Kentik data and walking through a sandbox. A user could add a test with dummy data or begin to configure their own data little by little or buy an entire bundle.

High Fidelity Mocks

Usability Testing & A/B Testing

There was emphasis on two areas:

1) How to show the users Kentik Synthetic results. It was clear users wanted to see total page load time, reachability over time, and hops. Loading their actual results took too much time and caused user abandonment, reducing the effectiveness of the feature.

We tested 10 internal & external users and 9/10 were comfortable with a generic positive/negative graphic associated with the chart type as long as the information about their URL was accurate and easy to digest. The end result is a svg vs. customized charts loaded quickly, increasing time on task.

2) There was debate among marketing, engineering, finance, and SDRs about how to set up an initial trial account. We could through the input of one email address create a trial account for a user without them having to fill out a form. This would create a more seamless experience and less barriers to entry for a trial account. Due to goals of other teams, competitor baselines, and GDPR compliance we implemented the form based option rather than the single address option, leading to RBAC as a next step.

Handoff & Tagging

Aligned cross-functionally and from a user perspective, these feature requests were added into the Github pipeline to be tasked in the quarterly UX projects stream. I worked with development when questions arose to help resolve the ticket and tagged the flow and features in Pendo upon release.

We tracked retention of core events among trial users within the first 30 days and had a 71 percent retention. Looking towards the future and product led growth, Kentik is strategizing towards bundling and stacking product areas where customers find the most value based on need.