Case Study: Jira within Slack
I. About
👋 Intro
Atlassian Corporation is an enterprise software company that is best known for its product Jira, a project management tool used by millions around the world. Slack is one of the most popular communication software in today’s technological world. Together with a well-versed team of a project manager, eight developers, a content writer, we set out to understand how we can integrate the two platforms together.
🚨 The Problem
We needed to find a way to define how a widely used project management tool can operate within the constraints of a collaboration software. The stakes for this project were high as issues with installation, setup, and managing of the current integration were affecting the huge intersection between Jira and Slack customers and companies such as Airbnb, Target, NASA, Netflix, Nintendo and others.
🏁 Goal
Help users gain focus and do work faster with less context switching by allowing them to work with Jira, within Slack. Ultimately, this will assist them in making informed decisions because of relevant, contextual, and timely received information.
Having said that we set out to understand what are the specific needs the customers have and question whether those needs are the real human problems we should be solving for?
II. Process
Following the Design Thinking approach we developed a plan, divided into three stages:
◀ Understand
Understand the product, clarify initial assumptions, uncover user pain-points, and insights.
🔬 Research
Over the first several months I focused on analyzing the current state of the app, reviewing competitors and building empathy for the users.
Both qualitative and quantitative research helped me in my pursuit of customer insights. Reading through direct customer feedback, doing user interviews and interpreting statistical data were an eye-opener.
Some of the most memorable user quotes are outlined below:
🤔 Interpret
The handful of user insights were a great basis, however, we needed to dig deeper. Our team got together for a 3-day workshop in order to develop our process and go over the results.
First, we summarized the gathered knowledge about the users into personas, after which we traversed through the user’s journey, and identified pain-points at each stage. To name a few:
- Customers not knowing their Jira instance URL, which was needed for integration install.
- Established connections were redirecting to a wrong Slack channel, giving the impression that installation wasn’t successful.
- App configuration was misleading and not flexible enough to accommodate different user needs.
✍️ Problem framing
We condensed the pain-points into 3 main categories:
1. Installation
The statistics we set up showed that the completion rate on installation was less than 40%, because of difficulties in the flow.
2. Signal to Noise Ratio
A big chunk of the customers uninstalled the app, because of the overwhelming notifications, which they didn’t know how to configure.
3. Feature Parity
Important capabilities were missing in the Slack integration, making it ineffective in team communication.
◾️ Solution
Visualize the solutions in a way that they can be validated as well as refined early and often.
📕 Product Principles
Establishing fundamental pieces of advice to follow throughout the process of the app design. Example of 3 principles:
🏗 Prototype & Design
Bringing positive solutions to life while consistently validating them with the development team. The main solutions to our problems can be found below:
3-click Install
In reconsidering the user journey, we came up with a concept about logging the user first. This gave us the knowledge to transform the Jira-Slack connector into a simple in-chat form, hence fixing the problems users were facing with the installation.
49% Increase in Jira project subscriptions to a Slack channel. (From 603 to 899 per day)
Smart Defaults & Custom Configuration
Our team tracked and analyzed the most common notifications people use and set them as a default configuration. We also enhanced the notification configuration screen for Slack with an option to add custom webhooks and switch to Jira Query Language. This helped us tackle the issues with the signal to noise ratio.
40% Decrease in negative feedback regarding noise.
Introduced new Jira Features
Based on our initial research and triaged feedback we introduced a few of the most needed features like the ability to create, watch, transition and comment on a Jira issue. The solution to customers needing more Jira functionality in Slack.
80% Success rate on the adoption of most requested feature, Create Jira Issue from Slack.
Other improvements:
▶ Evolve
Design never ends, but we need to continue our pursuit of perfection by improving the product on a consistent basis.
📈 Behavioral Analytics Events
By tracking the right user flows and metrics we identified how we can evolve the product, so it stands the test of time.
Data bath meetings were our teams’ bi-weekly way of analyzing drop-offs together, triaging user feedback, and brainstorm on potential improvements.
🎙 User Testing
Testing the new features on real users helped us validate most of our solutions by doing test sessions based on pre-defined scenarios.
Dogfooding and blitz testing were the other techniques we applied throughout the process to make sure we’re shipping a quality product.
✌️ Conclusion
It was challenging to understand what caused user issues and to reproduce features from one system into another. With a lot of trials and errors, we did it successfully. The most important lesson we learned is that setting metrics for a project is a crucial part of the process and a great way to measure progress.
🏆 Results: 379% Monthly Active Users (MAU) increase in 6 months.
— — — — — — — — — — — — —
Reference
App on Slack marketplace
Atlassian + Slack partnership
Article on new features
Crafted with ❣️ in Austin, TX © 2020 Made by Miro
