Background

What is Autoscale?

Autoscale is a cloud computing functionality that enables you to scale your virtual servers up or down based on the parameters you set. In IBM Cloud, you can start autoscaling by creating an instance group.

What are Load Balancers?

Load balancers are specialized resources that take in data and direct it to different virtual servers, avoiding down servers and distributing traffic to healthy servers.

Why Attach Load Balancers to Autoscale Instance Groups?

Load balancers can balance incoming requests across instances and allow configuration of health checks.

The Problem

1. Engineers utilizing autoscale complained that they couldn’t figure out how to attach a load balancer pool.

Other VPC engineers who managed to figure out attaching also complained that detaching was unintuitive as well.

2. Autoscale is hard to find in the navigation.

The 2 autoscale services (instance groups and instance templates were sitting beneath the screen cut-off, due to the fact that VPC Infrastructure has grown in services quite a bit.

Research

I talked to the 3 cloud engineers as well as 2 internal VPC engineers to understand why the user experience was so difficult.

Personas at Play

The engineers fell into either one of these categories: an infrastructure builder or a solution planner.

1. Infrastructure Builder

2. Solution Planner

   
   

Pain Points

Pain Point 1: “I can’t figure out where or how to attach a load balancer pool.”

Root Problem: There are hidden prerequisites the user must go through in order to enable pool attachment to instance groups. But other than a small section in documentation, this information is not readily available anywhere.

Possible Solutions

Final Decision

Pain Point 2: “Deselecting a pool is very weird.”

Root Problem: Load balancer pools takes up a very small amount of screen real estate, which meant the only feasible action there was a dropdown. However, using a dropdown for detaching is undoubtedly unintuitive.

Possible Solutions

Edit > Deselect pool button

Edit > Detach with overflow menu

Final Decision

Detach as a secondary card button

Pain Point 3: “To be honest, I don’t think anybody knows we have instance groups and instance templates.”

Root Problem: Logically, instance groups and instance templates are compute-related services, so when engineers see the Compute navigation section is minus autoscaling services, it falsely appears as if we don’t offer them.

Instance groups and Instance templates were tabs nested in the Auto scale page. They did not exist in the lefthand navigation, leading customers to believe that we did not offer those two services.

Competitive Comparison: Navigation Architecture

Final Decision

Impact

Daily external visits to instance groups and instance templates up since Autoscale updates were live 😊

Next Steps

• Conduct A/B usability testing to measure exactly how much easier the new design is compared to the old.

• Investigate if we can automatically complete prerequisites for user so they can attach load balancer pools more easily.