Screen Recording 2025-04-30 at 19.25.13.mp4
Environments in Contentful were built as a way to manage larger updates to content models. What we didn’t anticipate is that they would also be used to manage content releases, as well as being used on large projects with high stakes. They became a bottleneck in users’ continuous workflows, causing access issues and delays.
Improve usability of environments for multi-disciplinary teams — including engineers, editors and content owners — working on large projects.
My product manager and I first looked at user feedback related to environments. The feedback came in through multiple channels: support, in-app forms or direct communication with customer success. We then cross-checked submitted feedback with data on very long environment creation and found 7 customers we could interview.
I included the entire team of engineers in those interviews. They were there as note takers, or to follow-up on things they would hear in the interview — it helped getting a different perspective.
UX Research interview results, categorized and grouped into themes
The insights were indicative of the problem area — Tooling, specifically migrations ******— but it wasn’t enough for us to focus on what we needed to solve. Do we make environment creation faster? Should we make migration scripts easier to write?
To alleviate some risk of jumping to solutions and help align on the problem area, I facilitated a user journey mapping with the team on the topic of Environment tooling. This brought to light how much we don’t know and it was a great starting point for further research.