The question
Can engineers find what needs attention—and trust what they find?
IEP Maintenance brought framework and infrastructure information into a self-service platform. Around general availability, the team needed a baseline of how well engineers could discover components, interpret their status, and determine a next step. I partnered with product, engineering, design, and research colleagues to turn those questions into four realistic tasks.
My approach
How I worked through it.
Recruit experienced users
The study targeted frequent Maintenance users through platform analytics. Twenty-three participants represented developers, application owners, and hybrid roles across several business areas.
Measure behavior and perception together
Moderated sessions covered Builder Nodes, Frameworks, Terraform Modules, and Blueprints. I compared task performance with effort and satisfaction, then coded recurring friction.
Prioritize for action
I ranked themes by breadth of impact, experience severity, and recurrence. AI-assisted transcript analysis was checked against manually coded sessions before the final synthesis.
Baseline task success
Discovery was uneven.
Evidence to decisions
What mattered. What it changed.
Finding a feature was not the same as using it
Builder Node discovery had the lowest reported task success at 54%. Framework discovery reached 85%, yet framework satisfaction was only 60%.
Design directionAddress navigation and actionability as separate design problems.
Unknown data undermined confidence
Missing lifecycle information and unclear refresh or source metadata made it difficult to trust the maintenance view.
Design directionExpose data freshness, source context, and explicit target versions.
Dense workflows needed a clearer hierarchy
Users managing many components needed actionable priorities and ownership context, not equal visual weight for every item.
Design directionPrioritize lifecycle severity, support compact lists, and route dependencies to the right owner.
Contribution and outcome
Fourteen themes translated into product priorities.
The study established reported baseline scores of 86% usefulness, 82% satisfaction, and 78% ease of use. Fourteen themes became a severity-based set of recommendations and a baseline for tracking subsequent changes.
How to read the outcome
Task success and satisfaction values describe the baseline study. They establish where the experience started; they do not measure the effect of subsequent product changes.
Explore the research readout 12 presentation slides
Reflection
A healthy overall satisfaction score can coexist with a serious task failure. Comparing the task-level and overall measures made the roadmap more specific than either measure alone.Let’s talk through the work