On Friday, February 13, Hussain and Jon woke up bright and early for the first meeting with VMware since we pivoted ideas. We met with Terry, a user endpoint support guru, and Nate, an executive support employee. The goal of the meeting was to learn more about the troubleshooting process from their perspective and to get some initial feedback on our first prototype.
The first thing we discussed was their day-to-day in order to better understand the work they performed. Both Terry and Nate solved the issues assigned to them by directly working with users to solve the problem. Nate specialized in working with executives while Terry focused on the average user. One key insight we learned was that that 30-40% of the issues they encounter are quick fixes.
Next, we asked some questions to test some of the underlying assumptions to our idea of a smart ticketing system. From this, we learned that many of the issues are repetitive – meaning that support is asked to resolve the same issues multiple times. Additionally, under the current system used at VMware an article is written for repetitive issues to be added to the knowledge base. However, Nate and Terry mentioned that these articles are frequently not used as they tend to be poorly written. We also asked about the usefulness of logs when diagnosing a problem. Nate and Terry said they do sometimes use logs to assist their work, but that the logs come from many sources, such as from logs from iOS devices, desktop computers, servers, etc. The many sources of logs present a difficulty if we wanted to create software that could manage these logs and then diagnose problems from them.
Lastly we showed them a very rudimentary POP (Prototype on Paper). Although the prototype was quite simple, it helped Terry and Nature better understand our idea. From this, they provided a very helpful suggestion — filling out a report to resolve an issue needed to be as unobtrusive for the person resolving the error. If this process was too cumbersome and there was no apparent benefit to completing it, they were confident workers would quickly disregard filling out reports.
At the conclusion of the meeting we had some good information that would be helpful in creating the next iteration of prototype.