Indexer Status

“Since this product is so complex, the idea of using a chatbot to assist users is revolutionary. I have not seen any other product do this. And it should be in every one of our products.”

My Design Process

A structured approach for a 30-engineer team

I created a design process diagram to help integrate design thinking into the engineering team. The process moved through Problem Space (Understand, Observe, Define), Solution Space (Ideate, Prototype, Test), and Develop Solution (Reflect) — with specific methods mapped to each phase.

Understand

Existing page

The product team repeatedly received customer feedback that this page was not meeting their needs. After going through the feedback, it was clear that:

• Users were frustrated they were not getting notified of issues.
• It was difficult for users to see problems and then manually investigate and figure out the issues.

W+H questions help to gain new insights and information and start capturing the problem in a structured manner. This was completed as a workshop with the involvement of the Product Manager, sales and support, who regularly meet with customers.

Problem Statement

System administrators are failing to keep the indexing system operational due to a lack of information on the status of the indexing service, which is causing frustration and risk due to sessions not being indexed.

Design Principles

A list of design principles was made to define guidelines that constitute the framework for the team during a design thinking project.

Jobs to Be Done

This helps to focus the design on adding value for the user to help them accomplish their tasks. By meeting with Product managers, sales and support in a workshop, I can capture the customer tasks (jobs to be done) in a structured way to gain new insights which reveal hidden tasks which optimise the entire user experience.

Red Routes

I organised a workshop to prioritise the Jobs To Be Done into a Red Routes diagram to identify the hierarchy. This lets us quickly determine which tasks should take priority in the design.

I also got engineers involved at this stage to understand any difficulty implementing these tasks. This was important as it provided numerous occasions where tasks were impossible due to technical limitations, technical debt, time, and resources.

Observe

Personas

As access to direct customers was limited, Steven System was created. A fictitious character who represents a user and helped the team emphasise when designing this feature.

This helps to visualise our users' goals, desires, and needs and share them with various teams while keeping a consistent understanding of a target group of users.

User Flows

Define

Define Success

Due to the nature of this product being on-premises, it is challenging to define success without data and metrics. However, it was decided that we could measure the number of support enquiries to determine if there was a decrease in indexer-related issues.

Understanding the Existing Design

Understanding the existing design and determining whether user testing was performed was essential. I spoke with subject matter experts and support to understand how users currently use this page.

It was clear that many users do not use this page as it does not provide value. Feedback from users said the page did not provide useful information or help them maintain the indexer system by providing errors, solutions or prevention.

Understanding the Current Technical Restraints

During meetings with engineers, it was clear that not all of the Jobs To Be Done listed were possible when designing this feature. Getting engineers involved early at the ideation stage was vital to stay within the project's scope. This feature was also designed in a way that was future-proof for future iterations and additions.

Ideate

Brainstorming ideas

I took all of the research and started to create sketches and rough ideas for the design of this page.

It was clear from the Jobs To Be Done and Red Routes that there were three clear, distinct categories of tasks:

• A temporary space for urgent errors and warnings for errors that needed urgent attention.
• The system's health at a glance allows the user to identify problems that may need attention in the future quickly.
• Performance information for long-term tasks like managing resources and maintenance.

However, it was decided that only the urgent and status sections would be included in the first release due to technical limitations.

First Ideation

I first started by exploring the information architecture needed to fulfil my previous research — laying out some simple alerts and brainstorming how we might display urgent information, health information and performance.

Design Challenges

Problem Iteration

A new problem surfaces

During the ideation stage, it was clear that simply presenting users with problems does not improve the experience. After talking to support and other subject matter experts, it was clear that we needed a better approach to guide users to solutions.

The current situation forces users to manually find the problem and then search a knowledge base to try and find a matching issue. Only then can they go through the process of reading the document and following along with instructions. This was costing our business money in support tickets and frustrating users.

An additional problem statement was written

System administrators struggle to find solutions to indexing issues, resulting in frustration and an increased risk of system instability.

Ideating this new problem

With this new problem defined, I explored ways to also guide to a solution.

Final Design & Prototype

Test

External Window

This feature is due for in-person usability testing with customers. However, many interesting interaction design issues arose during the Chat-Guided Solutions prototyping, talking to subject matter experts and internal testing.

Results: we could not anticipate the size or number of windows. Users often preferred having many windows open at once. I added these features to meet this need for flexibility:

• Move the Chat into an external window.
• The external Chat window returns to the source window if it is closed.
• Minimise the Chat when the window gets too small — minimise the Chat and offer a toast to move the Chat to an external window.
• If using Chat in the external window, the links clicked affect the source window.

The Outcome

A design that changed how the company thinks about support

The redesign shipped and was tested with real customers to very positive feedback. But the biggest impact went beyond this single page.

The chat-guided troubleshooting approach triggered a company-wide conversation about how One Identity delivers support. The traditional model — users search documentation to find solutions — was replaced by a new vision: the product anticipates problems and guides users to solutions conversationally. This design didn't just fix one status page — it established the direction for how the company approaches support across its entire product suite.

As Richard Hosgood put it: “It should be in every one of our products.”