Highlights: In this project I designed the entire end to end experience, worked closely with the CEO and other executives, and also collaborated with other designers.
Confluent Data Exchange
A new feature to allow users to share their streaming data with people within or outside their organization. With the introduction of data sharing, it can bring awareness and discoverability of Confluent Cloud to new users who may have never heard of or used our platform before, while also helping improve the workflows of our many existing customers.
About Confluent Cloud
Confluent Cloud is a streaming data service based on Apache Kafka and used by developers to process their data to build applications.
Role
End to end design
Worked with
PM and engineering
Goal
Drive awareness and adoption by making it extremely easy to share and consume data from Confluent.
Process
This project functioned differently than most projects I’ve worked in. The PM had already done initial interviews with 15 customers and found a lot of demand for this feature as well as what the customers wanted. We were tasked with “functioning like a startup”, by moving fast to launch the feature quickly and get feedback from customers. I did weekly design reviews with the CEO, CTO, and other stakeholders so that we could iterate quickly to finalize the design.
How does Data Exchange Work?
The main goal of Data Exchange is to allow users to easily share their streaming data with people within or outside their organization. But it’s important to understand that there is no 1 single linear flow for Data Exchange. There are 3 different use cases for how someone can encounter Data Exchange.
As a producer - Sharing my data with someone
As a consumer - Receiving someone’s shared data and being able to access it
As an existing user - Discovering shared data in the product
For Data Exchange, users can share topics with one another. A Kafka topic is a category or feed that stores messages. Producers send messages and write data to topics, and consumers read messages from topics.
Design Principles
Help users easily share data with others while feeling confident about security
Make shared data easily accessible and usable
Make our platform viral and sticky with shared data
Designing for developers
Final Designs
End to end flows
Sharing my data with someone
2. Accessing the data that has been shared with you
Once a topic has been shared with someone, the person it has been shared with will receive an email notification that will guide them to Confluent Cloud to access their shared data.
For new users, this would be their first interaction with Confluent and they would have to create a new account.
Accessing and using shared data
Once a user has accepted the email invite, they will be able to see details of the topic that was shared with them. They can then access that data by linking it directly to their system or setting up a client to be able to read from that topic.
3. Discovering Shared Data in the product
Discovering data share
To bring awareness of this new Shared Data feature and also provide a way for users to easily manage it in the future - I added a tab for Shared Data that will be located on the homepage. This makes it easy for existing users to discover the feature when browsing through the product and it makes it easy for new users to find it when thy first log in. It also makes sense for it to sit on the same level as the homepage in terms of hierarchy since shared data is not tied down to a specific environment.
Impact
Data Exchange launched in May 2023 and has already been adopted by 72 organizations