User experience (UX) is the hot topic these days, and there has been plenty of discussion about making customers or other end-users of software as happy as possible. Often overlooked, however, is the UX that technology staff members are receiving -- which often leaves something to be desired. After all, technology types don't need to apply UX to themselves, right?
Photo: Joe McKendrick
This was the gist of a talk[1] given by Amy Nguyen, infrastructure engineer with Stripe, who points out that "the fastest way to become a 10X engineer [one who is 10 times more productive than other engineers] is by enabling 10 other engineers to do their jobs better," she points out. It's important, then to focus on empowering technology teams to "use the tools we develop correctly, quickly, and independently. Yet we often fall short of that mission in unexpected ways," she says.
Nguyen, who designs and maintains monitoring tools for her company's technology teams, says it's just as important to make the tools used by tech teams easy and intuitive to use as a consumer-facing applications. The goal is to "prevent misunderstandings. Not everyone is -- or should have to be -- an expert at interpreting monitoring data," she relates. "Unless you literally work at a monitoring company, not everyone at your company should know about how to use a monitoring in time-series data. Designers, developers and SEO experts need to track the performance and output of their work, but "don't need to know about time-series data to do their jobs," she says. "It's really easy to misinterpret this data, because it's complicated. You don't want people at your company to reach the wrong conclusions just because the tool made them confused."
Nguyen makes