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MyLink
Insights

How might we enable employees to self diagnose wifi and computer issues during the work from home era?

Project Type

End-to-end product design for a Meta internal tool

My Role

Product Designer

Target Users

80k + Meta Employees (Full-time & Contingent)

Duration

3 Months (Aug 2020 - Oct 2020)

Contribution

  • Stakeholder interview

  • Competitor research

  • Wireframes

  • High-fidelity prototypes

  • Usability testing

MyLinkInsights_Final.png

Impact

In production and launched to every Meta employee! People use it daily to test home network and VC call quality.

Overview

Background

Have you ever been in an important video call meeting, then all of a sudden people start complaining you are lagging? Or your video gets blurry? 

 

When the world started working from home in March 2020 after covid hit, that was the case for many. It was at first a struggle for Meta support to keep up with all the support requests related to working from home.

What if we could limit support requests by making them more self serviced? That is exactly the goal of MyLink Insights. The tool is a portal that provides information about network speed, latency, top talkers (which processes consuming resources), traceroute, TCP retransmissions and system usage.

Stakeholder Wireframe

Stakeholders came to us with a preliminary wireframe and we were prepared to take their vision and make it a reality!

Why are we building this?

  • To help employees self diagnose their own network issues

    Identify data classifications

    • Example: Could test with VPN on vs. off to see which is faster​

  • Comparing one’s own network to rest of other Meta employees

  • Aggregate all this data to produce new metrics for WFH

Who are we building this for?

  • Any Meta Employee

  • Debugging teams i.e. AC/VC team

Terminology

  • Latency

    • ​Latency is a measure of delay. In a network, latency measures the time it takes for some data to get to its destination across the network. It is usually measured as a round trip delay - the time taken for information to get to its destination and back again.

  • Download Speed

    • Download speed is how fast your internet connection can transfer data from a server to you.

  • Upload Speed

    • Upload speed is how fast your internet connection can transfer your data to a server. 

  • Top Talkers

    • A list of all apps that are running, and which ones are using the most bandwidth. Includes sends and receive values.

  • RTT (Round Trip Time)

    • The time between initiating a network request and receiving a response.

  • Traceroute Map

    • Traceroute measures each hop on its way to a destination. This section on the dashboard measures the duration of time between when the data is sent and when the ICMP message is received back for each hop.

  • TCP Retransmissions

    • The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which is the rate that data is successfully delivered over a TCP connection, is an important metric to measure the quality of a network connection.

    • TCP makes sure the data is put in the right order, and none of it is missing. TCP also helps to control traffic on the internet so it does not get overloaded.

  • System Performance

    • System performance is a way to show the amount of work accomplished by a computer system. This section of the dashboard shows you “How well is the computer doing the work it is supposed to do?”. It basically depends on response time, throughput and execution time of a computer system.

  • Recommendations

    • Smart recommendations for how to improve the wifi speed and desktop performance. Determined this was not in scope for MVP though.

Design Iterations

Early Playground Design

V1 Design

v2_MyLinkInsights.png

XFN Feedback

  • Add device owner & UDID in top identification bar

  • Add ability for AV/VC teams to test other devices

  • Option to save a test

  • Add button for list of run histories opposed to widget

  • Ability to refresh each widget, with last updated time for each

  • Remove latency and integrate it into the upload and download speeds

  • Upload and download speeds

    • Add links to (Scuba) data tables for additional info

    • Add percentile thresholds

    • Add test metadata: Actual duration, megabits transferred, total requests made, latency

  • System Performance

    • Link to ODS

    • Add color thresholds for CPU

  • Traceroute

    • Remove the color badges for the time since it is hard to trace

  • TCP Retransmissions

    • Ought to be four lines instead of current chart look

    • Remove warning

  • Top Talkers

    • Add send/receive values (Upload/Download)

    • Add sorting

    • Add process ID for each application

  • Reconsider usage of color - what do users want to see the most?

V2 Design

TestAnotherDevice.png

Usability Testing

User Testing Prototype

User Testing Script

User Feedback

General UI / Design

  • “Devices Tested” in DL & UL cards to faint- hard to read

  • Add vertical scrolling bars where content is cut off

    • i.e. top talkers, traceroute​

  • Change last update date time stamps to relative time

    • Ex “Last updated 15 minutes ago”

  • Add warnings if data is over 24 hours since last updated

  • Have the refresh widget button always visible? Or make bolder?

Identifying User/Device Metadata

  • MAJOR concerns around privacy if we allow other employees to search other peoples network

    • Because it will show VPN region & traceroute; this exposes where users are working which is sensitive data

  • Concerned most users won’t know what UUID is- add tooltips

  • Additional metadata suggested

    • If on Lighthouse

    • Detecting Network Appliance

Upload & Download Cards

  • Add “Jitter” metadata

  • Percentile confusing- needs more clarification

  • Add ability to just run a speed test

System Performance

  • Wants CPU Utilization visibility

    • Ex. “Chrome is eating up 75% of cpu because you have 100 tabs open”

    • Having this as time series chart would add value

Traceroute Map

  • Need to add number of points indicator at top of the card

    • Because the list is cut off by viewport, most participants thought there were 6 points instead of 10

  • Need to consider which point is 1 or last one (i.e. origin or destination) i.e. ascending or descending order​

  • Add headers for rows

  • Show total round trip time along with the latency of each point

  • Need to communicate what is normal & how to fix it

    • I.e. if there are too many hops compared to people in same city

Top Talkers

  • Need to add reference of time

    • “Is it 500 giB for a month or day?”

  • Would be useful to make this into time series like TCP Retransmissions

  • Add

    • CPU utilization percentage as column

    • RAM utilization percentage as column

TCP Retransmissions

  • More valuable to show graph of packet loss

    • Easier to read

  • Add threshold lines to communicate if above, worse, or average

  • Want to graph by a customizable time range

  • Consistent vs spurts packet loss important- need design to emphasize this

    • If one off, not so worrisome

    • If overtime- important- may need to reset router

Test Another Device

  • Major privacy concern (Identifying Metadata)

  • One user complained the semantics of this button is weird- need to consider if last update time is different

Survey Results

Usefulness Score 3.66/5

Avg UX Score 4.33/5

Final Design

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