Introducing Workspaces, a New Experience for Neo4j Developer Tools
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Introducing Workspaces, a New Experience for Neo4j Developer Tools
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Introducing Workspaces, a New Experience for Neo4j Developer Tools
- 1. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. Workspace: A New Experience for Neo4j User Tools Ian Pollard, Product Manager, DX Michael Hunger, Senior Director, User Innovation
- 2. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 2 Spoilers User Tools Are Changing
- 3. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 3
- 4. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 4 Neo4j User Tools
- 5. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 5 Explore data, find questions Ask questions, get answers Model and import data
- 6. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 6
- 7. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 7 “I have to login in to each tool separately, every time.” “I end up with a lot of windows or tabs open to do my work.” “Love the tools, but they’re inconsistent and lack interop.” “I got lost… I don’t know what Aura, Bloom, or Browser are.” “I didn’t know Bloom existed or what it did, it looks so useful!” “After the Cypher tutorial, I wasn’t clear how I was supposed to work.” 7 New Users Existing Users
- 8. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 8 I don’t care about products or understand them all, I just care about my data and what I want to do with it.
- 9. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 9 Your products don’t always look or behave like they were made by the same company...
- 10. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 10 The Design Problem
- 11. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 11
- 12. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 12 Conway’s Law “... organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” Conway, Melvin E. (1968), How Do Committees Invent?, Datamation Magazine
- 13. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 13 You ship your org chart. 13
- 14. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 14 Silos are Bad! Silos are Great! ● Divergent thinking, even if it’s sometimes “right” ● Inability to scale ● Reduced perspective and limited scope ● Consistency is expensive ● Naturally efficient, short lines of communication ● Specialist insights ● Ability to move quickly ● Honed instincts for customer value
- 15. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 15 Browser Desktop Bloom Console Importer Ops Manager Docs more… Designer Designer Designer Designer Designer Designer “Designer” YOLO! 15
- 16. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. Research Design (Figma) Tailwind Config CSS (Utility classes, components, variables, etc) HTML React Components Other Libraries Design System Best Practice
- 17. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 17 Browser Desktop Bloom Console Importer Ops Manager Docs more… Research Design (Figma) Tailwind Config CSS (Utility classes, components, variables, etc) HTML React Components Other Libraries App Specific Design Design System Storybook Zeroheight Shared Styles Shared Components Best Practice Products are now “consumers” of design
- 18. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 18 Workspace Demo
- 19. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 19 Workspace Release Plans
- 20. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 20 Guiding Policies • “Aura-first” in our approach. • Standalone tools still available. • Workspace will be able to offer single-app access. • Non-Aura modalities should also benefit from Workspace. • Workspace and the design system. • Workspace is a framework for coherently adding new capabilities. Workspace is a framework, not a final destination.
- 21. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. GraphConnect EAP Internal build of Workspace (including Bloom, Browser, and Importer) for demos and presentations. Early access sign-up available for attendees. SERVIC ES Early Access Beta EAP to gather further user feedback and iterate Workspace. Focus on adding missing features, design system adoption, and new user experience. 5.0 Workspace for Aura Completion of functional requirements and improved app interop.. Focus on help and learn and onboarding flows. Next Platform Experience Workspace as a framework to add new capabilities. Focus on user collaboration and more app interop. June 2022 June - August 2022 October 2022 TBC
- 22. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 22 neo4j.com/workspace Sign up for early access
- 23. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 23 Q&A
- 24. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved. 24 Thank you! Contact us at workspace@neo4j.com
Editor's Notes
- Introductions
- Let’s start at the end of the story: this is Workspace - the future of our user tools. … it blends Bloom, Browser, and Data Importer into a single coherent surface. … this builds on years of work developing powerful user tools. … and Workspace’s focus is to enhance your productivity. … we want the full capabilities of our tools to be naturally discoverable. … and also intuitive to your workflows. … we want it to help speed up your time-to-value or time-to-knowledge. So, we are really excited to be here talking about UX. … we hope this talk is interesting. … but we also hope that it inspires you to see Neo4j’s commitment to purposeful design. We’re going to get into a live demo of Workspace with Michael, but first… … let’s start at the beginning. … the story of Workspace is a story of our commitment to your time and productivity.
- The context for Workspace is our user tools. Browser, Bloom, and now Data Importer, are important tools that help our users get value from their data. If you’re a learner, they offer ways to start your journey and unlock your first graph epiphany. If you’re a mature user, these are the tools that help you get your work done. Each tool has its own ambitious roadmap… … but we wanted to pump the brakes on features for this next iteration. … and instead spend time thinking more closely about user experience and productivity. This was a bold move for a company that has traditionally been quite engineering-led… … but the hypothesis resonated. … perhaps we have too many tools. … and perhaps that complicates user workflows. … you can do a lot with our tools, but are we really optimizing for your time?
- To this understand more, we undertook multiple rounds of research. … we spoke to new users and existing ones. … across developers, data scientists, and analysts. … we also spoke to our colleagues and began to gather data. … the feedback was stark.
- For new users, we learned that the efficiency of learning was being undermined… … they didn’t always discover our products or know what they were for. … they loved our tools when they started using them, but they were unsure about how they fit together. … there wasn’t a clear sense of how they might build their workflows. For experienced users… … there was definitely some resentment about needing to login to each tool separately. … but also a clear concern about the time-and-motion required. … lots of windows or tabs need to be open. … and also a sense that the products could perhaps work together more seamlessly. However… … the most common feedback was…
- This came up often… … users don’t care about products… As a product manager, this one perhaps hits quite hard. … what do you mean, you don’t care about my product? How dare you! But what users were articulating was: … they care about actions, capabilities, the jobs-to-be-done. … they liked and saw value in our products. … but didn’t always understand the separation between them. … or why they needed one for this or one that. We also heard from both internal and external conversations was…
- That, as good as the products were… … they don’t look the same. … they don’t behave the same. … and they don’t talk to each other. We also now had a much clearer understanding of why this mattered. … getting close to the details with our users, we learned a lot. … specifically, that user workflows often could, or should, span more than one user tool. … and this was key to productivity and discovery. And here’s where we come back to need for UX. … we could have continued to add many new new features in this release… … but it was clear that with a re-think on our UX we could unlock more value for users. … that was attractive to improve what we already had… … but also for what we might add in the future.
- In short, we had a design problem. Design here not meaning just visual design… … but being purposeful about HOW we build products… … who we build them for… … and the jobs they are trying to do.
- We approached our re-think on user tools from a UX perspective. … there’s always more feature to add… … but first we needed to get the foundations right. Now, you may have come across the ‘Basic UX’ framework. … if not, it’s a great place to start analyzing UX. Now, if we were to make an honest assessment of our user tools… … we can argue around their beauty and simplicity… … we can probably wrestle with the importance of intuitiveness… … after all, our users are really smart! But… … the foundational concern of all UX is consistency. … and this is where we needed to focus our attention. … consistency matters… … it improves the ease of learning… … and reduces the chance of errors or confusion. And the first step was to understand why UX consistency was so hard for us.
- The problem is incredibly common for organizations. … and it’s well understood in both theory and practice thanks to this guy, Melvin Conway. … I’m sure some of you are familiar with Conway’s Law. This quote from his paper ‘How Do Committees Invent?’ often gets garbled. … but here’s the correct version. He said: “Organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” Or…
- As we often abridge it: … “You Ship You Org Chart” What that means is… … good firms are rather efficient at solving customer problems. … if you have enough specialists and smart people, finding solutions is rather easy. … and therein lies some risk.
- This efficiency naturally manifests silos… … like minds and experts group together around a problem. … and silos are not inherently bad. … they are teams and business units with short communication lines. … clear insights into customer problems… … and ideas for their solutions. … they can move quickly and create customer value. But in that, we also find divergent thinking. … consistency degrades. … and attempts to apply consistency are hard and expensive. So, fighting back against Conway’s Law is both a structural and an operational challenge. … if products externalize our internal structures, we need to change our structures. … and we need to do it in a way that doesn’t degrade the value of our dynamic capabilities. … and our ability to efficiently create customer value.
- So let’s take a look at one way we have approached this at Neo4j. … focusing on scaling design and improving UX consistency. Here’s a partial view of our team structures. … designers embedded fully within engineering teams. … which is definitely not a bad thing at all. … but things were too siloed. Worse… … as you got further out from the main product estate… … design was unevenly applied. Where to begin? … first, we needed clearly needed to abstract UX and UI at a higher level. … centralizing some of this function is key to consistency. … second, we needed to find a way to better operationalize design. … and find ways to get designers working more efficiently. … allow them to scale asynchronously to support more teams. In short, we need to find new structures and processes… … to support a complex re-design and the unification of 3 products. … and do so, frankly, without being hated by our colleagues.
- The key change we’ll focus on was the creation of a new team to build a design system. … you may see design systems publish their component libraries… … more or less the Lego from which you can build new products. … however, a design system is more of org and process change than anything else. Our design system (Neo4j Design Language) does some key things… … it centralizes and operationalizes design in a way that scales. … it embeds research as the first step. … and from that it extends to best practice. … whether that’s interaction design, color theory, accessibility, or something else…. … it’s all embedded here at a system level such that it is infused throughout our products by default.
- With the design system in place, teams and roles have evolved. … designers are still working closely with their product teams… … but those designers and teams are now consumers of design. This approach has meant we have been able to build Workspace in record time. … and we’ve done so with a much higher standard of design. … higher consistency and a reduced cost of quality. … rather than designing and building a button for the 20th time… … the design system covers most of our component needs. … instead designers can work UX research or app-specific special cases that add real value. … and engineers can spend more time solving interesting and valuable problems. For a company very fluent in engineering, this is a big change for Neo4j. … we are now getting more fluent and confident in being design-led. … we’re still evolving, there’s more we can and will do… Workspace is an first output from these changes. … but we hope it is something that excites you as much as it does us.
- So, I hope that’s some interesting background on the journey to Workspace. … a bit of behind the scenes on how Neo4j as an org. … and how we are championing users and productivity. That’s enough chat from me. … let’s now take a look at Workspace in action… … and see some of these UX improvements for real. Over to you Michael.
- Workspace is in internal preview right now. … we expected to open up an Early Access Program shortly after GraphConnect. As GraphConnect attendees you can signup today. … this gets you to the front of the line in terms of Workspace access. … it also gives you the opportunity to collaborate with us. … we want you to give us your feedback, suggestions, and feature requests.
- Before we get into dates, let’s take a look at our approach. We are focusing initially on Aura. … although if you have a secure non-local / self-hosted DBMS, you could connect to it with Workspace. … this assumes a 4.x version of Neo4j. You can carry on using standalone versions of our tools. … at some point, your single app access will likely be via Workspace. … you won’t lose anything, but you will benefit from better UX and better contextual help. When we think about other modalities like Desktop… … it makes sense that this also joins up with Workspace and the design system. … that’s an intent at this point, not a formal plan. We also see Workspace as a framework. … if we want to add new capabilities, we can now do so more coherently. … Workspace is built to be extensible.
- Here’s our release plans for Workspace. … here at GraphConnect, you’ve seen Workspace in action here. … you can also head down to the demo booth and see it 1:1. … and you can sign also up for the EAP. We expect the EAP to launch this month. … but that’s not a fixed date; we’ll do our best and things are looking good. Next we move to a beta will run through to the launch of 5.0 in October. … during that time we will be adding any missing features. … responding to feedback. … and building a new learning experience. … we’ll look to gradually open this up to a wider audience. Beyond 5.0 there’s more to come. … we do see Workspace as a framework. … other tools and capabilities may find their home in Workspace. … further interop between the features is likely to be a focus.
- You can signup for Workspace now via this URL. … and your invites will be arriving shortly. We really value your input and would like you to help us shape Workspace. … we want you to be part of the feedback loop. … we’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions. … and the early access program is designed help us learn and prioritise. Please do sign up at this link we’d love to you onboard. Thanks for your time. … we hope it’s been interesting. … and we can’t wait to get Workspace in your hands. We now have some time for questions. … but before we do, any last thoughts or comments Michael?