OpenTelemetry — Garnering User Feedback for a Better Product
OpenTelemetry — Garnering User Feedback for a Better Product
OpenTelemetry takes user feedback seriously. One of the best ways to improve a product is to receive direct feedback from the users of the product. This is often very difficult to solicit, as you must find a new user that is willing and able to give feedback during a new implementation cycle. During Q4 last year, the OpenTelemetry PHP team followed a process suggested by Ted Young in order to garner some feedback and drive the development process.
OpenTelemetry has many maintainers working on SDKs for various programming languages. A regular maintainers’ meeting is held regularly on Mondays for everybody to discuss cross-cutting questions. The user research document presented at OpenTelemetry maintainers meeting contained a lot of key information in the practical application of the OpenTelemetry service. SDKs maintainers are often so tied to specification documents, release candidate notifications, and collaborative discussions around implementation details — It becomes easy to forget about how an end user will use your product. The analogy I like to use is “I know how the engine works, but I very rarely drive the car.” Receiving feedback from end users is a perfect way to find the gaps in your product and learn to work towards building a better product.
The user research process we followed runs through a gauntlet of steps which include creating a sample project and implementing OpenTelemetry instrumentation in that project. While this may not sound exciting, by design it forced contributors to go through an installation and setup workflow very similar to what future users will face.
The hands-on nature of the exercise helped us better understand where we could significantly improve the first-time user experience, answering implementation questions such as:
- How does a development framework interact with OpenTelemetry?
- Where is our documentation lacking?
- Are there unhandled exceptions that the end user was expecting?
- Where is the end user experience falling short?
To conclude the user research process, participants provided comments and structured feedback via a form. Gathering collated responses to common questions can give valuable feedback to a development team. Often end users have a difficult time quantifying toil and ease of use. This cycle also gave us an opportunity to tweak the process — asking a couple more context-specific questions will help us to fine tune the process in the future.
Creating this document and sharing it with our developers has led to a bunch of forward thinking ideas. This was a smart exercise to execute, and we will most likely do it again in the future as the project continues to grow and our needs continue to change.
This week the first version of the Tracing specification was announced in OpenTelemetry. The specification defines core concepts, scenarios, and semantics of tracing. Maintainers of all languages are putting forth effort to implement the specification in a way that feels correct for their specific programming language and platform.
If you’re interested in working on the OpenTelemetry PHP project, we have a LFX Mentorship Opportunity available for the OpenTelemetry-PHP project!
Thank you Ted Young for the header photo in this article!
