2025-09-30 –, Room 1
Focus on intent: what people are trying to do with the system. While product analytics might give a broad sense of “what happened,” making sense of telemetry pointing to “what went wrong” is key to improving the system. For users, the specific issue doesn’t matter, because the software doesn’t work!
As software has become more complex, observability into its processes has been key. But the reason for this observability might have been lost.
Observability hasn’t focused on intention: what people are trying to do with the system. While product analytics might give a broad sense of “what happened,” making sense of telemetry pointing to “what went wrong” is key to improving the system. For users, the specific issue doesn’t matter, because the software doesn’t work!
If a user can’t log in to their web portal for medical records due to a failing backend service, or because the modules are too old to load on contemporary browsers, or one of any other technical factors, the engineering team has failed in their relationship to the user. It might appear as an error or crash or failure to load, but to someone who intends to check on their blood tests, it’s simple frustration.
In the world of browsers and mobile devices, technical issues prevent the success of the system. This success should be the goal for the entire engineering team: after all, if an API delivers a payload that the client can’t use, it has failed the user. An examination of the system that points to the user, with telemetry from all technical parts of that system, is the only way forward. That is user-focused observability.
Hi! I am a Developer Relations professional, working at the intersection of user interfaces and observability.