Turning liability into lead-gen.
300% increase in downloads. 20% fewer support calls. The app redesign turned a cost center into a sales opportunity. And the patterns spread throughout the org.
Project Details
- COMPANY
- Splunk
- ROLE
- Sole UX Designer
- LENGTH
- 6 months
- TEAM
- 1 UX + 6 dev + 1 PM + 1 QA
- YEAR
- 2015
About Splunk
Splunk leverages a powerful search and analytics platform to turn machine data into real-time visibility. It surfaces hidden patterns and anomalies across infrastructure, applications, and security systems.
The Splunk App for Microsoft Exchange was built to give IT admins monitoring visibility into their Exchange environment. But it wasn’t working.
The app strategy was failing.
The problem
The Exchange app was failing to gain traction with IT Admins.
The cost
The app was generating support calls instead of sales.
The stakes
No data, no license increase, no revenue growth.
The original user experience required navigating between dozens of individual tools.
Changing the mental model
The IT Admin Toolbox was for putting out fires.
Service monitoring to see the smoke before the fire.
Users wanted visibility
“I want big green lights.”
— Key IT admin customer and stakeholder
Instead of scattered tools, I designed a single monitoring page with traffic-light KPI tiles that could zoom to fit a Network Operations Center TV. Red, yellow, green at a glance, with drill-down when something needed attention. The page stopped being a troubleshooting tool and became a confidence indicator.
A traffic-light dashboard needs thresholds, and admins don’t have best-practice ranges for every Exchange KPI memorized. I built a configuration tool that pulled in historical KPI data so admins could set thresholds against their own baseline — not someone else’s best practices.
When something went yellow or red, admins needed to drill into the details. I designed KPI swim lanes to contextualize logs — letting admins scrub across time and compare metrics side by side. The drill-down turned the dashboard from a signal into a diagnostic tool.
KPI Swim lanes to contextualize logs
The Exchange app had three critical dependencies — Splunk itself, the Windows add-on, and Active Directory support — and none of them were checked before install. Admins would download the app, hit a wall, and call support. I designed a setup wizard that detected prerequisites automatically and only let admins proceed once their environment was ready.
Results.
Downloads
300% increase in app downloads — IT admins were using the app and getting value.
Org Wide Impact
UI patterns adopted by Splunk’s flagship IT app. Wizard and single value tile added to core Splunk.
Support Calls
20% fewer support calls, despite increased usage, traced to the setup wizard.
Endurance
The patterns have persisted and still show up on company home page, and product pages.