Tap into the power of user experience at the platform level to streamline engineering activities, improve developer success, and enhance user workflows
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When digitally transforming the business, organizations will often invest in hybrid and multi-cloud while exploring the potentials embodied in the platform business model. By employing a platform engineering program, it’s possible to gain a competitive advantage and reach their lofty objectives by providing new features to end-users faster through efforts to streamline the application development, deployment, and operations.
Platform engineering allows the product development teams to focus on building new features for end-users as the platform engineering team handles the core service development, automation, and tooling for the infrastructure, application deployment, and ongoing management, which leaves feature development to the product development team.
“Applications are the windows to the platform business model. They can be designed to open up new user workflows and experiences that increase success in customer decision-making and transactions that ultimately generate revenue and accelerate other critical business outcomes.” Blog post—Platform Engineering: The Great Equalizer
Many companies also realize that having dedicated user experience engineers (UXEs) join the ranks of the platform engineering team can create and share usability-driven and experience-validated services and capabilities across multiple products.
1. The Role of UX Engineering on the Platform Engineering Team
The User eXperience Engineering (UXE) role works as both a designer and a developer, sitting on a cross-functional design team—the platform engineering, perhaps. To define and develop user-centric designs across the functions to be presented to the users in the form of user interfaces and activity workflows, they are tasked with bridging the gaps between design and engineering. UX engineers are typically front-end engineers tasked with analyzing the user journey from start to finish, applying the best and latest user experience practices to the team.
In the case of platform engineering, the UXE would focus on creating the self-serve elements that the product team could utilize, delivering confidence to the product developers knowing that the UX experts have considered the experience aspects from the platform level up to the interface and workflow levels.
“Apps built on a platform engineered to support the business tend to be simpler to access and use.” Blog post—Platform Engineering: The Great Equalizer
The value of incorporating user experience engineering as part of the platform engineering model includes a shared, cross-platform, multi-product ability for the teams to:
- Leverage market and end-user insights to optimize the platform and the products
- Increase customer acquisition, engagement, and loyalty
- Improve product usability to maximize performance, interactions, and transactions
2. Features, Processes, and Workflows
With a platform engineering model in place, organizations can develop standard features to meet the needs across their entire product line. These features can be coded and deployed in a manner that allows for rapid delivery and updates, making it easier to provide new capabilities to the end user faster.
With the platform team responsible for creating self-serve pluggable components, product developers can integrate those capabilities without getting mired in activities like infrastructure provisioning and maintenance. Product developers can instead focus on making the custom workflows needed to ensure success for the users. They can also work on streamlining the processes for end users to complete their tasks and transactions.
“Developers can focus on creating applications that customers enjoy using instead of trying to get all the infrastructure elements to work across the entire infrastructure—in the cloud, on-premises, and from mobile to the web.” Blog post—Platform Engineering: The Great Equalizer
UX members working with the platform team can focus on the UI, workflows, and visual user experiences shared by the product teams. Streamlined deployment and operational simplicity mean users get their new and improved experiences faster.
3. Availability, Performance, and Stability
Platform developers can look for new ways to meet product requirements and end-user expectations by exploring new technologies—such as IoT, AI, and Edge computing—that can bring the application and a more informed and engaging experience closer to the user.
“Automation allows the platform to operate securely downstream with as little friction as possible for developers and users.” Blog post—The value of platform security, compliance, and automation
Similarly, investments in streamlining the development, deployment, management, and maintenance processes can also help improve application availability, increase service performance, and control integrations to ensure better platform and product stability as the users move through the applications.
4. Privacy, Security, and Compliance
The platform engineering team can help centrally define the user experience and operational workflows, looking at risk aspects covering cyber, privacy risk, intellectual property, and regulatory compliance.
“According to Gartner, by 2025, 75% of organizations with platform teams will focus on improving the developer experience and accelerating product innovation, further advancing the role of platform engineering in business.” Blog post—The value of platform security, compliance, and automation
As they examine and define the platform and services, the platform engineering team can effectively put in guardrails to help protect the rest of the platform engineers, the product developers, and the deployment/operations team from introducing unnecessary exposure to these risks. With the UX engineers involved, the user experience can be maintained even when security requirements are met.
We Deliver Award-Winning Experience
Platform engineering services from Taos:
- create a resilient and scalable infrastructure
- streamline application development and deployment
- improve engineering efficiencies and developer experience
- and enhance user workflows
These capabilities all equate to maximized business value.
”Taos is a recent Frost and Sullivan award winner where we were recognized for our customers “proudly owning the company’s product or service and have a positive experience throughout the life of the product or service” Blog post—Taos awarded Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Company of the Year
Learn more about Taos Platform Engineering Services.
https://www.taos.com/cloud-services/taos-platform-engineering-service/