Kubernetes Usability Special Interest Group, 4 Sep 2020

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: SIG Usability: Unifying the Experience for the Kubernetes User - Gaby Moreno Cesar & Pamel Shinh

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming events: EnvoyCon Virtual on October 15 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual from November 17-20. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conferences feature presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

SIG Usability: Unifying the Experience for the Kubernetes User - Gaby Moreno Cesar, IBM & Pamel Shinh , VMware

SIG Usability is focused on the core end-user usability of the Kubernetes project. This includes efforts in user research, internationalization, and accessibility. We will be going over some of the SIG's initiatives, opportunities to get involved, as well as diving into the topic of what makes up a usability contribution? Pulling from the field of cognitive science, we will present some well-established usability and software experience principles that both code and non-code contributors can use to expand the types of contributions they make to open source projects.

https://sched.co/Zeue

A

Hi welcome to sig usability session, I'm pamela shins top product designer at vmware uh today, currently navigating the world of kubernetes.

A

Gabby, I'm gonna, let gabby introduce herself.

B

Thanks pommel, my name is gabby. I'm a designer at ibm, also working on anything kubernetes related.

A

Well, we really appreciate you being here uh to start off to give you an overview of what we'll be talking about we'll start off by giving an introduction to sig usability, how it came about and what have been. What are we working on and who are the people who should be contributing to this sick, uh we'll focus some time on our ongoing work and what we've been doing there and how you can contribute if you want to and what the plan is for going forward.

A

So sick usability, an introduction to it. It came about when a bunch of us decided to talk around the space of user experience and kubernetes. We wanted to focus a little bit on usability and experiences of the kubernetes users and we thought why not use the open source community and platform and leverage it in terms of starting a dialogue and discussions around that today we have a diverse set of contributors.

A

We have product managers, product designers, developers all from different different fields that have been coming together to basically focus on one goal: to unify the experience of kubernetes and have experiences that are good enough for the kubernetes space, but going forward uh we're going to be diving a little bit deeper kind of taking a user experience approach to this presentation and talking about the journey of two of our contributors panel, the designer and gabby the developer, and this is their journey to sig usability.

A

So, let's talk a little bit about pamela pamel is a product designer at vmware three years ago she was assigned a project that integrates kubernetes into vmware's virtual platform. This would enable their customers to deploy kubernetes workloads, which was a big big change for their platform.

A

Wow. The pressure panel felt at that time she had to learn so much about kubernetes, so she started her research like any other designer. She went to her pms and engineers and ask them whether you could learn more about kubernetes. She had a lot of questions. What is kubernetes, how do I design for kubernetes, who am I designing for? Are there any industry standards and what about like, reaching users? How do I get access to them?

A

There were a lot of lot of questions.

A

So she got access to a lot of and tons of like technical resources which helped her understand, kubernetes and why it mattered to her company just to reference a few that the kubernetes documentation, which we all know of a ton of youtube videos and, of course, the kubernetes zoo story about vivi the giraffe.

A

Well, that really helped her initially, because that was the easiest thing to actually refer to to start with, but she still had to like continue her project just like understanding the users and understanding all these missing pieces. That was still just so difficult to understand. I bet she had access to some resources that would help her understand what the others were doing in this space. Were there any case, studies about learnings and pain points and just understanding the kubernetes users, or just understanding the users? What did they want from her? What is this?

A

What is, how could she help them understand them and give them something that they wanted from their product, because, in the end, her goal was simple, just understand her users and deliver experiences that were relevant to them now moving forward, gaby is going to talk about her experiences as a developer.

B

Thanks pommel and I'll actually be channeling my inner developer here, because um I'm a designer but the representing how sig usability fits into our code contributors for kubernetes um project.

B

So uh you know imagine gabby is a developer at cloud core and three months ago her company made the strategic decision to contribute their next feature on their product roadmap to the kubernetes project.

B

So she was assigned to work on this feature and ever since then, she's been getting used to the kubernetes community's code, their tools and their processes.

B

Despite the learning curve here, this has actually been a great experience for her. She feels like she understands kubernetes a lot better. Her contributions have also caught the attention of some other company's developers, and they have also started contributing to the project. So that's really neat for her.

B

However, as time goes by, she feels pressure to to wrap up and to move on with her company's internal roadmap. You know, dunn is better than perfect, but she does like to do things right and feels like her future could be even more efficient, reliable, not to mention usable.

B

You know, localized accessible, the works so just to recap kind of like how sig usability fits into here. um You know as code contributors, we want our code contributions to be meaningful. We want them to be efficient, reliable uh and usable, but you know everybody, as contributors has limited time to dedicate you know we all have our day jobs um and, in particular, uh usability usability expertise is you know something that can be very specialized and say. For example, you have some code contributions that you're working on.

B

How do you get user feedback on that in? In a streamlined way, so this is kind of where um sig usability comes in, where um our goals for for all of us as contributors, is to really look at the experience of stream kubernetes and make it more consistent uh and user friendly. We also you know.

B

The sig is a great place for both designers developers, researchers, product managers to to start you know, building their um open source foundations from sig usability is also here to help contributors understand their users and who they are designing and contributing and developing, for.

B

We also want to be able to offer resources and have a unified language for usability across the kubernetes project.

B

So with all of that said, uh sig usability actually just turned one year uh in july we were started in july 2019 and right now we have 73 members in our google group and 127 members in our slack channel, which you all are welcome to join. As far as companies actively contributing to the project we have pivotal. Google ibm vmware and red hat.

B

And I'm going to talk a little bit about some of our ongoing work. uh We have everything from some research projects going on to uh visual design work, so I'll go ahead and give a an overview of that.

B

um Our persona guide is one of the first projects that the sig uh started working on.

B

So when we got started, I think, as I say, it made a lot of sense for us to kind of come together and start talking about um who uses kubernetes like who is kubernetes for, and I think we had a great inventory of the types of people that use it uh led by boaz and their previous research at vmware, and what we realized kind of after coming out of these discussions is that there are so many roles that use kubernetes and they can be so overlapping.

B

uh An example of that is a kurenado's operator and then an app developer. uh You know we all know that the that divide is not as clean as as we like it to be, and so that kind of turned into the next project that I'll talk about here, um which is our job study.

B

So for for some of you that maybe come from a user research background.

B

um You know you may have heard of a jobs to be done, approach and kind of how it lets you look at what people are trying to achieve with the products that they're using so cncf actually puts out a great survey every year that breaks down some demographics of the kubernetes community, and so we can kind of see how kubernetes adoption is going and what this study is trying to do is kind of be an extension of that and say talk to some representative people that use kubernetes and try to identify high value and high opportunity use cases that we as a community can improve on and the state can do that because we are cross-cutting, we're not um looking at any specific area of kubernetes but across the whole experience.

B

So if you want to learn more about that, there's a google doc link uh here in the slides and we can share that afterwards as well.

B

So this takes us to our other project, which is currently led by josie at pivotal or vmware.

B

Josie is looking at um at how labels are used across the kubernetes project, specifically usability related labels, so she's looking not only at kubernetes but also other open source projects and to see how those labels are used, and hopefully you know in in the future, we can align on a set of labels uh that we as seek usability, can kind of rally around that may cover areas such as accessibility, internationalization and ui, not to mention ui and basically like what that can.

B

Let us do is we can start socializing these labels and kind of surface usability concerns across the project. So thank you josie for working on that and with that, I will pass it out to pommel to talk about one of the projects that she is working.

A

On gabby, um so icons, icons was uh one of the first few things that initiated the talk about having a sig around usability user experience and there's a pm of mine tasha, uh also a co-chair on the sig uh that was working with me on the project and we looked around for icons that we could find in the open source community that we could use in our products, and we found that there was nothing out there that we could reference to uh which led to the discussion of how can we make icons uh more consistent across the community as there's a lot of integration and requirement of consistency in terms of visual discussion, around objects and kubernetes objects so going forward now we have an icon repository that we are working on.

A

uh There's a google doc, that's linked below. So if you have any recommendations or would like to work with us on designing a particular icon that is in is required for you or your product uh do reach out to us or leave comments in the google docs so that we could work on it together.

A

So looking forward, uh that was all the work that we've been doing and is currently in the works. So if you have a time or you would like to work with us on any of this project or have uh recommendations, please do reach out, but we do have some projects that we want to start focusing on going forward a few of them. A few ideas that we want to focus on are focused on heuristics accessibility.

A

How do we make kubernetes more accessible and useful for everybody in the community and really focus on the developer side of the experience as gabby was mentioning through her journey story that there is this developer persona that we want to start supporting through the sig, make resources and make things available for them that make their life easier as when they they are doing their jobs and delivering kubernetes to others.

A

So you can get involved and contribute and be part of a company by a bunch of ways. Some of them are. You can join the sig usability slack channel or you could follow us on github and see all the discussions uh in the sig usability github account. We have a kubernetes group called the kubernetes usability. This is where you can read all the past. Discussions uh get access to all the documentations that we were mentioning before.

A

This also gives you access to the meeting invites which happen once a month on tuesdays, where we discuss any open items or anything related to usability, and the fourth thing is that we do want to encourage you to share your experiences on medium tag us or talk about your experiences with the usability of how we can contribute more to the kubernetes space, specifically in the usability space and I've linked an example here, a very good, medium article written by gabby.

A

It talks about being a part of the sig usability committee and how you can contribute more. I would definitely check with your organization if you can contribute. uh There are definitely sometimes uh documents that you might have to sign to be a part of a community like this or to contribute in a community like this.

A

We are always looking for ideas for discussion or areas for discussion in the usability space or how we could enhance the discussion around usability. It's an easy process.

A

It's not very defined at the moment, but what we do is, if you do have an idea come to one of our meetings propose an idea um we can discuss it over there has you know you can get some feedback. You can also identify members that can help you with the project.

A

We do encourage, uh representing like an initial plan or a timeline for your project everybody's busy, but it gives like a sense of uh just knowing where the project is going and once you have your project in a good place, uh we tend to do a final share out uh and document the product uh project so that other people have access to your findings, uh so they can reference to it if they need going forward, so that was it for today.

A

uh Thank you for uh reaching uh coming to our session and learning about sick usability. We would love to have more contributors and people joining our team to talk usability. uh So please do reach out to gabby and me, or uh you know, get involved in any of the ways that we mentioned before. Thank.

B

B

It doesn't look like we have any questions in the chat um if anybody want to drop, wants to drop them in we're happy to take them, and if not, we can end early.

B

I'm not seeing any questions, so um I think we could go ahead and call it uh uh call it a session and uh pamela, and I can go ahead and share some of like the links that we mentioned in our presentation, on the slack um slack being uh two kubecon maintainer after this talk. So thank you all for coming.