Jolata: Telecom Analytics

UX and Data Visualization

The Jolata team created a brilliant piece of network timing hardware called Jolata Meters. These Meters can be placed at any wireless network tower to monitor, track, and analyze millions of packets of data every second. To extract value, Telecom customers needed an interface that easily allowed operators to uncover the root cause of network problems. 

From a concept in a slide deck to product shipment, I led the UX and analytics visualization design for Jolata's first product.

Research Driven User Flows

Through focused interviews and candid conversations, we began to collect information about the day in the life of a network OPS engineer. We discovered they end up fighting a lot of fires (figuratively speaking). Sometimes they're aware of recurring problem areas, but sometimes they have no idea what's slowing the network down. The key was that they needed realtime views into their systems, as every second counts in the Telecom industry. With this information, I began to make persona oriented flows. This user story would become our driving design scenario for the entire project.

Brainstorming Interactions

Once we locked in a primary scenario, I discovered there were multiple use cases the product needed to account for. For example, the user might browse their dashboard on a desktop, view their key metrics on a large monitor, or launch an investigation from an alert. I began to grasp potential screen interactions by white-boarding numerous scenarios. This exercise served as the inspiration for ideas that would lead to the eventual layout of the app. 

Sketching Layouts and Workflows

The following are a few of the layout sketches for the main components of Jolata. With the user story in mind, I was able to accommodate three core modules which are the main dashboard, the investigation tool, and the alert builder. From layout concepts to stakeholder reviews, sketches continuously served as an integral part of the process. 

Furthermore, I used this exercise to dive into the data visualization aspect. By laying out the story on paper, I can pinpoint what moments require historical analysis, thresholding, benchmarking, and so on. This knowledge begins the process of building a visualization library that can be used throughout the app. 

Final Design Implementation

Here are some of the screens that shipped with the final product. It was crucial that the Product Manager, the Development team, and myself were in sync throughout the entire process. This allowed us to build out many POCs along the way to prove our concepts from both a user perspective and a technical perspective. We leveraged D3.js for the analytics views. D3 is a beatiful JavaScript library for highly interactive data visualizations. It's great for designers because it gives us maximum control of the analytics experience, which is something that is lost in many generic charting tools. 

The first version of Jolata shipped in the Fall of 2013, with an expanded release in early 2014. Jolata currently serves the Telecom industry, but is rapidly attracting other sectors such as enterprise, cloud, and financial service markets.