Splunk — Case Study
Designing for How People Already Work
How I turned 8 hours into 15 minutes by letting the robot copy your clicks.
8h → 15m
Setup time reduction
150+
Non-technical users enabled
~85%
First-run success rate
Context
Why does setting up a robot test require an engineer?
Splunk Synthetic Monitoring is like hiring a robot employee to test your website 24/7 — checking checkout, login, and signup every 5 minutes so you find problems before customers do. But to set up that robot, someone had to know the system inside out.
Stakes
When the robot isn't watching, real people pay the price.
Rent the Runway lets you rent a dress for your wedding, your interview, or your big night. Browse, select, book — it shows up at your door. But in 2019, their system went down for 11 days.
Imagine renting a dress for your wedding. The site glitches. Your order doesn't go through. The dress never ships. Your wedding. Ruined. That's why companies like Rent the Runway use Splunk Synthetic Monitoring — a robot that checks their site every 5 minutes, from 100+ locations, before real customers notice anything's wrong.
11 days
System down
$9M+
Estimated loss
1000s
Orders never shipped
The tool existed. But only specialists could use it — so most teams didn't.
Before
Build step by step. Hope you get it right.
8+ hrs
To set up one test
$150K+
To hire a specialist
1 person
Bottleneck for the team
What if setup was already done?
Insight
I couldn't fix everything. So I picked the one door that mattered.
I led design on this project with one PM and two engineers. No time to redesign the whole system. So I focused on one entry point — Chrome Import — because that's where setup died for most users.
The insight was simple: don't make people learn a new system. Capture what they already do.
After
8 hours → 15 minutes. Engineers → Everyone.
Click through your site in Chrome. Import the recording. Done. The robot copies what you already did. Teams moved through setup with confidence — knowing the system reflected how they already worked.
Impact
Chrome Import didn't just make setup faster. It changed who could own reliability.
15 min
Setup time (from 8+ hrs)
150+
Non-technical users creating tests
10x
Increase in monitoring creation
85%
First-run success rate
I turned 8 hours into 15 minutes — by letting the robot copy what people already do.
