I appreciate your interest in our latest product version! As products continue to enter new phases, it becomes increasingly important for design teams to start polishing the product experience. We aim to create a simple and efficient platform to serve our customers better and align with our business objectives. Therefore, in this significant update, we also want to share with you the philosophy of the design optimizations of our product experience.
1. Restructuring the Navigation for high scalability
After establishing the commercialization goals for the product, the first MVP, our cloud service Zilliz Cloud, was quickly released. An initial version was introduced, featuring a basic product layout with sidebar navigation and a tree menu. As the product evolved and new features were introduced, particularly in this release, exciting functionalities such as organization, recycle bin, and playground were added. This prompted a reevaluation of the product layout, specifically focusing on the structure of the navigation bar.
Collectively, we have three goals: avoiding cognitive bias, high scalability, and ensuring ease of use for businesses of all sizes.
Enterprise products typically serve different roles, and each role possesses varying permissions within the product. From the user’s perspective and the backend technical logic, functionalities are always categorized into specific levels, and your product’s structure must accurately reflect this. In the new navigation structure, we introduce a ‘Project view’ and an ‘ORG view’ to provide users with a clear understanding of distinct functionalities at these different levels. Additionally, these core interfaces will feature variations based on different roles and permissions.
The structure of combining a top navigation bar with a sidebar makes the hierarchy of functionalities much clearer, allowing for quick access to each feature as well. Furthermore, by rearranging pages and functionalities, we enable users to focus on the core operations of clusters within a specific project. Of course, in order to ensure that users can quickly find the functionalities they need, we have also conducted quick internal Usability Testing to guarantee efficient accessibility.
2. Easy and Fast Creation and Connection with your cluster and collection
Zilliz Cloud offers powerful features for “Vector Databases”, but they are meaningless if users have no chance to access them. For new users, they often don’t know what the product can do and how to utilize it. In the previous version, we achieved decent results by using onboarding to guide users through their first login. This encouraged them to create an “Aha moment.”
With a data-driven mindset, we discovered that only a small percentage of users were able to complete the full process based on the core functionalities. This is a considerable loss for both the users and us. Thus, improvements are still needed. To lower the barrier for creating collections, we introduced the creation of collections within the cluster creation process. We offer two creation methods: fast creation and advanced collection creation, catering to different needs.
Listening to user feedback has led to new discoveries. We sifted through user emails and focused on their feedback regarding the product’s user experience. Some users encountered obstacles when connecting clusters or collections, which led us to reevaluate the product workflow and identify pain points.
We also provide users with guidance at the appropriate moments for connecting. There are typically two scenarios where users connect clusters. These two scenarios are our optimization priorities.:
1) Immediately connect after creating a new cluster.
2) Identify a specific cluster and connect.
In addition to providing connection guidance after creating a cluster, we also reorganized the connection methods on the cluster homepage, and on the first screen, ensuring they are intuitive and helpful.
3. Light and Clean UI Experience
In addition to smooth functionality optimization, we also focus on the pleasantness of the interface. Our goal is to create a software experience that feels intuitive, enjoyable, and visually appealing. We have made improvements to the interface’s color palette, making them light and clean. In the product experience field, visual always serves the function, and the key is to set some principles.
1) The first screen is always the core. Although web-based products are scrolling based on the browser.
2) The key information and elements will be highlighted more prominently.
3) Iconography serves accurate information and brings pleasure.
4. Smooth Transition within and outside the Product
Undoubtedly, every team is highly concerned about the user experience within the product. However, due to the scenarios of our product, users may also need to switch between our product, email, or local deployment. For example, scenarios like login, register, password reset and organization invitations involve transitioning back and forth between the product and email/native applications. Sometimes they are easy to feel lost.
Users authentically switching in and out of the product is not always perfectly articulated based on the present moment. The journey of the time dimension and various edge cases must also be considered. This time, we re-evaluated the entire experience based on the customer journey to build a smooth customer communication experience.
5. Conclusion
We also have a lot of exciting features and optimizations in the pipeline. This requires a collaborative effort that includes product managers, a front-end team, and a copywriter to align priorities and expectations. As we continue to iterate and optimize the product experience, we’ll keep listening and learning from our customers and conduct quick testing and data to find answers. Our goal is to continuously improve the product experience, so if you have comments, suggestions, or ideas, feel free to drop them off from the support portal in Zilliz Cloud. Thanks for reading.
