FY22-Q1 Shared KR: Visibility of system status and system performance to improve SUS

Product and UX have jointly agreed to have a shared OKR every quarter to focus on usability.

Goal

This quarter Increase SUS to 72.5 by making focused improvements through Visibility of system status and System performance - areas where we’ve identified negative sentiment.

Long term Improve SUS scores every quarter to get us to a goal of 80. We are currently at 70.9.

Why is this goal important?

SUS is a signal of usability and delight. Most users of GitLab start and end their working hours with GitLab. We have a unique opportunity & responsibility to make their experience delightful and, in the process, improve the quality of their life. This goes beyond being a single application and goes to the heart of why most of us build products: to have a meaningful impact on the people who use our product. Coincidently and conveniently, this is also good for business.

Plan for Q1FY22

Based on the six usability themes highlighted by research and PM Inputs, here is the focus for each Section.

Focus by section:

  • Secure: System performance
  • Enablement: System performance
  • Dev: Visibility of system status
  • Ops: Visibility of system status

Call to action

Each PM and their Quad can help improve usability. Even small things help. A 1% change over 365 days leads to a (1.01)^365 = 37.7X improvement.

Each stage group should identify at least 3 issues that fall into their section's focus area of either Visibility of system status or system performance to work on during Q1 FY22. It's ok to have fewer issues to focus on if the improvements being delivered are harder to implement and take more time, as long as the issues make meaningful UX improvements. When deciding which or how many issues to take on, we should prioritize value and impact for our users.

You may but do not have to leverage SUS Usability issue by theme. There may be some high impact, low effort issues here so we recommend you take a look.

Tracking

To track all work associated with SUS improvement, please:

The target is 99 issues (3 issues for 33 groups). Some groups don’t have a dedicated designer (Memory and Database) and some groups share a designer.

References:

Improving SUS: a deeper look into the themes

Guidance on Prioritization

We want each PM and their quad to use their judgment when making these selections and decisions. For example, if you are exploring a new market - you may not have system performance challenges and so you may want to focus on the visibility of system status.

If you feel that your team is unlikely to prioritize this, please call that out in the comment section and tag @fseifoddini, @clenneville, and @adawar so that we are all informed and aligned on the exceptions.

Edited by Anoop Dawar