Honeycomb
Simplifying complex systems with service maps
Application
Overview
As software systems grow increasingly complex, the need for clarity within them becomes crucial. Honeycomb enhanced its observability platform with a new feature: the Service Map. This feature was envisioned as a dynamic tool to help engineering teams visualize and navigate complex system architectures. The initial concept for the Service Map stemmed from our customers' expressed need for better visibility into their service interactions and dependencies, particularly when diagnosing issues across distributed systems. My role as Product Designer was to lead the design of this feature, turning abstract needs into a concrete, intuitive user experience.
Role - Product Designer
Honeycomb.io
My journey
At the start of this project, my days were filled with sketching data visualizations to understand how we might visualize the relationship between services.
Working closely with a data scientist, product manager and engineers, we conducted numerous user feedback sessions and simple low fidelity prototyping in the beginning. The design process began with rudimentary visualizations and grew into an iterative, very collaborative endeavor with our users. Early versions of the Service Map were basic, focusing on raw data representation, but feedback from our users guided each iteration, making the tool more intuitive and functional.
Design. Prototype. Test. Repeat.
We realized early on that incorporating actual user data into our prototypes provided our users clarity and understanding and invaluable insights to make more informed decisions.
Challenges along the way
One of the most significant hurdles was designing an interface that could scale from showing an overview of thousands of services to focusing on fine-grained details without overwhelming the user.
We realized the importance of enabling users to navigate through layers of information progressively and adapting the Service Map to handle the varying scales of user data. A breakthrough came when we implemented a feature that allowed users to zoom in and out, providing both a macro and micro perspective of their systems. This functionality was refined through continuous user testing, ensuring it met real-world needs.
Impact and outcomes
Since its launch, the Service Map has been a key factor in driving new user adoption and facilitating the migration of existing customers to our latest platform version.
The service map feature was included in Honeycomb's Enterprise plans, and was made available to all Honeycomb users on a promotional basis until the end of 2022. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with users appreciating the ease with which they can now understand and manage their systems.The Service Map has improved teams' diagnosis and understanding of their systems, as evidenced by positive user feedback and enhanced engagement metrics.
