Lakeflow connect & Lakeflow designer

I conducted and participated in over 20 customer interview calls and summits at the beginning of this project. Here you can see the 'Ask an Expert' station at our conference where I met with customers to show them demos of upcoming products and get their feedback. I summarize the interviews specifically with a UX-lens to define pain points, feature requests, and existing user journeys. I'll use these findings to drive design decision-making discussions and as an input for future usability studies and user research. 

For Lakeflow Designer, this showed us that business users were intimidated by Databricks and wanted a no-code interface to turn raw data into actionable insights leveraging all the Databricks technology (data quality, permissioning, MD info,  scheduling, etc.) without needing to understand how the technology was working under the hood.

Then I perform competitor heuristic evaluations to deeply understand the competitive landscape from a UX-perspective focusing on Jobs to be Done within the larger context of the overall user journey. I then create a visualization that shows how we compare to our competitors at each stage in the user journey. This type of Blue Ocean lens allows me to recommend areas to focus on and really nail in our product to make us stand out as the best solution for users.

For this project, the analysis showed me that we could stand out from our competitors by building the best-in-class version of point-and-click data ingestion with seamless handshakes between Databricks and third-party databases, such as SQL server, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and many more. We could also stand out by making the next steps in the flow easy to perform, such as building a custom dashboard, downloading the data as an excel file, etc.

There are many different user research tools available based on the hypotheses we want to test. For these projects, I used Lyssna to do early evaluations on the happy path user journey. Then I met with people on our internal customer solutions team to understand if the designs would solve the pain points that their current customers were running into. With the high fidelity prototypes, I conducted guided user research studies with actual customers who would be using these tools. 

After the user studies for Lakeflow Connect and Designer, I wrote easy-to-understand reports and made slide decks highlighting the main recommendations based on severity, calling out potential future ideas, and going into detail on all these points with customer quotes and videos.

Using this data to drive design decisions is a powerful tool, but only one part of the larger product decision-making. If the team needs to make tradeoffs on what to implement or change, I will run a session with the team, in this case an impact analysis activity, to help drive the discussion on what would make the largest customer impact versus technical cost.