TEAM
2 Engineers
1 Project Manager
1 Researcher
2 Designers
MY ROLE
UX Design
How do we manage complex entities in a unified experience?
Entity Explorer centralizes entity management into a single, simplified interface. It allows users such as system administrators and IT administrators to easily search, filter, and take bulk actions across all monitored entities.
I collaborated on this project with a principal designer as an associate designer. The design aims to improve usability, performance, and consistency across product lines.
Types of entities, or the “things” we’re monitoring.
Challenges of a fragmented experience and misaligned entity data models
Through user sessions and usability studies, we discovered that users had to navigate separate management pages for each product or entity type.
There was no single location to view or manage all entities, and this fragmented experience made it difficult to monitor and act on the entire environment.
Internally, SolarWinds had disconnected management UIs built on outdated technologies. Also, entity types lacked alignment in properties and metrics, which meant a misaligned data model.
Legacy systems and misaligned entity data models.
Evaluating information discoverability through treejack survey
We conducted a treejack survey to evaluate the discoverability of information. In one task—"Where would you go to find the top 25 highest bandwidth interfaces?"—only 1 out of 10 users chose the correct path.
We discovered that users did not understand the purpose of the 'Entity Explorer' page, revealing a need for onboarding and clearer navigation cues.
Survey results showed that users did not understand the purpose of the page, and we needed onboarding and navigation cues.
Planning and brainstorming multiple entity explorer pages
Before starting design, we established 3 user stories based on research:
1. As a user, I want to be able to easily troubleshoot and find the root cause of any network, application, or service problem—regardless of whether this problem is at the network, application, database, storage, or another layer.
2. As a user, I want to be able to easily upkeep the things I’m montioring as well as my monitoring system itself.
3. As a user, I want to know the “availability score” for any subset of the infrastructure or the entire network. This can be a service, network segment, or subset of anything I’m monitoring.
We explored various iterations of the 'Entity Explorer' page, including filtering and bulk actions on entities. We also wireframed the ‘Entity Details’ page to show what would happen if a user clicked on an entity.
Established three user stories and started wireframing.
Explored various ways user might want to filter their entities.
Once a user clicked on an entity, we designed how the entity details page would look like.
Created multiple user flows for A/B testing.
Exploring multiple designs
Iteration 1: Entity types in a dropdown
The first iteration addressed the need to access different types of entities in a single view. Users could click on the dropdown to toggle between types without leaving the page.
Introduced a dropdown to toggle between entity types in a single view.
Content of panel would change based on selected object.
User testing iteration 1:
We identified some issues when testing the first iteration:
Usability: Dropdown was hard to find and use.
Scalability: Long load times with thousands of entities and mismatched properties across types.
Iteration 2: Making the dropdown more visible and usable
For the second iteration, we addressed the feedback that the dropdown was hard to find and use. We changed it to a persistent sidebar, so that the entity types were in a more prominent location and added roll-ups summaries to show environment health at a glance.
We also added bulk actions if users needed to take action on an entity.
Replaced the dropdown with a persistent sidebar list for clearer navigation.
Introduced roll-up summaries to show environment health at a glance.
Bulk actions for troubleshooting entities.
Further design explorations
Idea 1: Entity Explorer "Lite"
During our brainstorming phase, we explored a 'lite' version of the entity explorer that can be added into a dashboard view.
Idea 1: Adding Entity Explorer “Lite” as a widget in the dashboard
Idea 2: Node View
Another idea is to append a map view of the entities to show related entities (ex: children or parent nodes) and their statuses. This could also be added to the home page as a widget in the home page.
Idea 2: Appending a node view to show related entities and their statuses.
One thing I learned from this project was the value of iterative design and user testing. It was challenging to consolidate legacy systems into a unified model, but through collaboration with back-end engineering, we established a clear data model.
Also, I learned that clear communication of new features through onboarding and thoughtful navigation is as critical as the UI design itself.
