Designing the NetQoS Performance Center v3.0

by Russell Wilson
Network performance management is complex; there are many factors that can impair the performance of applications running on large, far-flung corporate networks. Network engineers and administrators must understand how applications are performing from the end users’ perspective, the composition of traffic on their network, and the status and utilization of the many infrastructure components that deliver the applications. This data is both voluminous and complex. At NetQoS, we design our products to make the complex, simple, and we invest heavily to do so.
For hundreds of large organizations, the NetQoS Performance Center is a web portal into thousands of performance metrics. Over the last year, it underwent a significant redesign and version 3 of the product was released in January. We began the process of designing the NetQoS Performance Center v3.0 (NPC 3.0) by gaining a deep understanding of what we were trying to accomplish organizationally with the product. We interviewed and talked to several stakeholders at NetQoS – people who work with our customers on a day to day basis – to really understand what the objectives should be.
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The next stage focused on learning what users need and expect from a performance management portal. This was accomplished primarily through interviews with customers and internal domain experts, and some observational sessions. Medium-fidelity functional prototypes were also used to illustrate features and interactivity.
We learned that organizationally, we wanted a platform to bring our products together and create added value – the principle of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. By adding several of our products and consolidating the data from those products in one place, we create new types of analyses and workflows that we couldn’t do before.
Users wanted that too – they wanted a single management portal where they could view data from several sources to get a complete picture of their networks, servers, and applications. Their focus is on data and they want to maximize the viewing potential of each of the graphs, charts and tables we provide.
If you use NPC 3.0, you’ll quickly learn that it has a minimalist design. We reduced the navigation to one bar. That was a key goal. This was so we could take up very little screen real estate – you’ll notice there’s no left-hand side navigation because we wanted to maximize the horizontal space for data views – and we wanted graphs and views next to each other so that users can easily compare them.
As part of the design process, it is a good idea to look at other works of art and at other products, not necessarily in the same market. In this case, we looked at watches, complex data displays including scientific instruments, and a variety of websites. We eliminated all left-side navigation so that it would not compete with the data views for horizontal space, and because of the nature of the portal as a “starting point” and “viewing tool”, and not an interactive-centric product, we reduced navigation to a single clean horizontal bar at the top. Then we explored how the bar could accommodate additional functions such as search, and we iterated on designs to evolve the menu system.
We really wanted to give users the ability to easily navigate to the data most important to them. Typically, however, there are many different metrics they need to access depending on the circumstances, so we could not rely on just having a default (home) page-we needed much more flexibility. With the NPC 3.0 design, you can get to all the functionality you want by navigating to it very quickly, but it’s not sitting in front of you at all times.
Of course there are several improvements and enhancements we will make over time. For example, most Network Operations Centers (NOC) have large screens which are used to display the status of the network. Some of our customers have the NPC displayed on those screens, but a current limitation is that we can only display two columns of views. This leaves whitespace on both sides, which is fine if you’re viewing it on a desktop monitor, but the NOC wants to take advantage of the extra viewing space. In the future, we will provide a way to display more than two columns of views. We are also working on time navigation, and workflow enhancements.
For usability testing, we use a product called Morae. It records video, audio and every on-screen interaction. But most importantly, Morae gives us insight into users’ choices: how they find things and where they get lost. It allows us to calculate how long it takes a user to accomplish a specific task so that we can focus our design efforts on improving the “task path” and ultimately user efficiency. And once we improve the task path, we test again because sometimes you find you’ve made it better, but sometimes you find you’ve made it worse.
There are all sorts of surprises when designing a UI. For example, “Platform feasibility” — Some people say that anything you can do on a desktop you can do in a Web based application these days, and that’s just not true (yet). The design originally required that the navigation bar and surrounding elements be fixed on the screen and the content underneath scroll (versus having everything scroll within the browser). This was ultimately not possible because of our use of drop-down boxes within the content area and the fact that the boxes would lose their position when scrolled. And it goes without saying that an understanding of technical feasibility is critical. Our original design for time navigation did not take into account the way data is actually stored and rolled-up (averaged) over time. We designed a very flexible time navigation component only to discover that we had to start over to account for the restrictions in the way we could present data based on how the data was being processed.
With NPC 3.0 now in general availability, we will be looking for feedback from customers and NetQoS personnel regarding problem areas needing improvement. We will also test NPC at regional customer workshops, industry conferences, internally, and one-on-one with various customers. Our ultimate goal is to deliver a “best-of-class” product, and we will use all the usability, design techniques, and feedback loops available to us to achieve that goal.
Russell Wilson is Director of Product Design at NetQoS.