Notebooks 2.0
Notebooks is Datadog's version of a collaborative document editor, where our users test hypotheses around why certain issues are occurring and to create postmortems detailing the what and why behind an incident.
While engineers are familiar with writing text in Markdown, there were too many friction points in our Markdown editor experience, stalling our product's growth and adoption.
The Markdown Editor
The existing markdown editor had three major pain points:
1. Users would have to switch back and forth between using their keyboard to type and then using their mouse to save or edit the cell.
2. There was a lot of cognitive overhead when moving from the view state to the edit state, and from the edit state to the preview state.
3. Users would create very long markdown cells, which were prone to merge conflicts.
Users and Use Cases
Our users are SWEs and SREs who use notebooks primarily during the Detection & Analysis and Post-Incident Activity phase of an issue happening. Whether our users are jotting down hypotheses, making comparisons during an investigation, or writing a postmortem, the last thing they want to think about are accidental merge conflicts, or encountering time-wasting friction points that make their time-imperative work more frustrating and difficult.
Competitive Analysis
The team wanted to develop a V1 as fast as possible - so I leveraged the design patterns of all relevant competitors in this space to fully understand what our user expectations were, which UX considerations were non-starters, and to make sure we were optimizing for all the right things.
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FINAL DESIGN
Just Start Typing
Instead of our previous empty state which looked like this:
Users can just start typing, instead of being prompted to mess with a complicated query editor they rarely use.
Stay on Keyboard and Reduce Merge Conflicts
Users can stick to their keyboard to work on their notebook, where pressing RETURN or ENTER saves their previous cell and creates a new one. By doing this automatically, users don't have to think about "saving", also reducing the potential for merge conflicts.
Formatting Text
Users can change the formatting of each cell easily, and all additional options are progressively disclosed only when users need it.
Slash Commands
Typing '/' opens a command menu giving users the tools and syntax to insert any data viz they need.
Keyboard Interactions
Users can also easily stick to their keyboard only when moving, rearranging, and editing text cells - maximizing their efficiency and remaining uninterrupted.
Reflection
Metrics and Measuring Success
Some of the metrics we decided to measure success were:
1. Reduction in number of merge conflicts.
2. New user adoption and general usage metrics.
3. % of users still using Markdown.
4. Additional qualitative-focused research sessions.