I was a Sr. Product Designer working remotely for Sauce Labs, based in San Francisco, CA. Sauce Labs is an all-in-one platform for web and mobile application testing and error monitoring. With everything in one place, Sauce clears blockers and inefficiencies in the development lifecycle so DevOps teams can collaborate better and move faster. As the primary product designer on the Mobile and Web value streams, my focus was on improving the user experiences for all web and mobile automated testing as well as contributing to the strategy of these value streams’ product roadmaps.
“Future Sauce”
Upon joining Sauce Labs, the company had made several acquisitions across the dev ops and software testing industry. These acquisitions were made to not only enhance the testing experience of current Sauce users but to expand the product capabilities in completing the DevOps test toolchain. “Future Sauce” was the internal codename given to the project that would explore the different ways of integrating the multitude of features and functionalities across Sauce’s product offering. The end goal of “Future Sauce” was to provide a “north star” experience that could set the vision for a all-encompassing DevOps testing experience.
Continuous Discovery Research
At the start of Q1 of 2022, the Mobile Value Stream wanted to kick-off the process of recruiting Sauce Labs users to begin doing weekly user interviews. Upon quick review of our existing research user panel, it was discovered that the targeted user group was not well represented. In order to get access to more users we needed to attempt an outreach program on our platform. We then set forth a research initiative that would coordinate outreach through the Sauce Labs platform to customers that would allow product team direct access to users. It was my responsibility to coordinate and disperse these interviews amongst the team, to provide guidance on interviewing techniques and note taking during design interviews, and iterate on the process when unforeseen issues arose.