TRAFFIC SEQUENCE

What is it and why was it needed?

Traffic sequence is a dashboard add-on which provides a high-level, non-technical overview of how products interoperate at a summarised level in Cloudflare. This gives customers in-situ context to understand how the changes they are making will impact other products they have.

You may or may not have heard of Cloudflare, but it is a part of most people’s day to day – 80.7% of all internet traffic goes through it and relies on its services. It’s fair to say then that figuring out how that traffic flows through the system is pretty important. However, while working on a new type of rule that had to run before most things and asking the crucial “what runs first” question, it became apparent that in truth, not even internally did we know for sure.

How it started and how it got this far

What started as a supporting piece for the work I was doing for Transformation rules (you can read more about that here) quickly began to gain traction and a life of its own. As part of my process, I bring discoveries, progress, questions and visuals to instigate at every collaboration opportunity with design colleagues and the Product and Engineering organisation. Through this far and wide oversharing and socialisation of the work, what was virtually a side piece ended up featuring as a star project in the Quarter kick-off, with endorsement from our head of Product.

As a designer, I had to prioritise for what was a useful simplification of a complex ecosystem, and what value this could bring beyond first application. Cloudflare had used the same navigation for a while, and this was a good opportunity to test out different mental models for that. We tested a lot of different iterations of this, and from orientation to the type there was a lot of detail to consider so it would be useful without being too distracting from the main UI.

What made this work resonate so deeply was how primal the questions we were asking were: what runs when, and in which order? This question is as important to customers trying to figure out where to set a rule in their traffic as it is to customer support trying to troubleshoot an attack. Me and the PM who initiated this were gobsmacked to find out how little we ourselves understood of our product, and how many disparate answers we had internally.

We got amazing results through research, with some of the highlights being:

• Traffic sequence solves for internal and external pain points

• It is useful as a bespoke way of navigating the product

• Instigates discoverability of products to customers

This was enough to allow us to ship to a small subset of customers through an A/B test, and the signal we got was staggering: it showed that people were clicking almost 3x more on things that lived in secondary navigation using our feature than using the regular navigation. This could mean one of two things: either people were discovering they had access to more things, or they were simply more findable now that they were 1 click instead of 3 away.

We used a short-loop of customer feedback and data to drive small improvements since launch, and this is the single feature with the most positive praise ever recorded in Cloudflare post-release feedback. Firewall rules, one of Cloudflare’s cornerstone security products, is now access via traffic sequence navigation 3x more than through regular navigation. The most crucial things for the success of this project were keeping it data-informed and bringing the right level of fidelity to the table at the right time – socialising it catalysed the whole project gaining as much momentum as it did. Read more about Traffic sequence here.