Pingdom - Good bye BeepManager
Pingdom is an website monitoring service, where users can set up monitoring on their website from around the world, and we will alert them if, or rather when their site is not reachable for whatever reason.
A natural evolution of this service was to launch BeepManager, a incident handling system, that helped our users to schedule who will receive these alerts during different hours of the night and even create complex schedules to support the work hours of our customers.
In reality – BeepManager confused our users more than it should, and after several years in production, the usage was so low, that it could not motivate the increased struggle to understand our product.
3% of the Alert policies had more than 1 assignee.
3.4% had different contact methods depending on severity of outages.
0.4% acknowledged and closed an incident in 1 month time.
At the time Pingdom had around 800k-1 million users who had a tough time using the primary feature of the product, the monitoring.
BeepManager had to go.
This means, that we had to migrate 800k-1 million users to a new platform, where our roles, user types, contact methods, and general setups was changed. This was a huge project and put a lot of weight on out UX team to solve the issues that surfaced with it.
During exploration and preparation phase we conducted a workshop together with different parts of the company to make sure we do not miss out on some pain points our users might have when moving away from the system they know, to a new system. We created a User journey map and identified where there might be issues, and where we need to guide the users. This worked as a base for planning the work that needed to be done.
The whole migration took around 1 year to perform, in several different phases based on how complex the users setups were. Overall a very successful project and several hundreds of thousand users ended up with a much easier product to use.