Reducing Cognitive Load & Responding Faster to Incidents

Incidents happen everywhere, everyday. At Jeli, we want every person, team, and organization to view incidents as opportunities to continuously learn & improve. Our goal is to meet people where they are in their incident response and analysis journey. For many of us, responding to incidents is not our main focus at work, but something we get involved in when they happen. We recognize that everyone has a different level of comfort in incident response, engaging with Slack bots, and remembering slash commands. We want anyone who might be involved in incident coordination and communication to feel comfortable using the Jeli Incident Response (IR) Bot . 

‍

The Jeli Incident Response Bot for Slack is the easiest to use IR Bot on the market and we’ve made some updates to make set up and use even easier:

‍

• You can now sign up for Jeli with a Slack account and authenticate via Slack as a single sign on option.

• Everywhere we’ve previously suggested a slash command to interact with the bot, we’ve turned that suggested command into a button. 

• If you mistype a slash command and it’s close enough to an existing slash command, we’ll just run that action for you.

• If you really mistype the command, we’ll suggest our best guesses. 

• We’ve also added emojis with the command text to all of the buttons.

‍

These emojis are intentionally placed consistently across buttons and slash commands to help guide users and create predictability. The emoji next to our summary field in Slack is the same one as on the /jeli summary button. The emoji next to our status field in Slack is the same one as on the /jeli status button, and so on and so on. This way, if we’ve provided multiple suggestions in the channel, you can save a few more seconds by recognizing an emoji.

‍

‍

Although we love an emoji, they are not just to make your Slack channel more colorful and fun. There is science behind this integration of emojis and buttons. The human brain processes images in roughly 13 milliseconds, about 60,000 times faster than text. And while a few seconds saved from typing in a command or reading through to find the right one may seem small in the grand scheme of things, it’s not about the time. We’re helping those involved in incident response shed some extraneous cognitive load, so they can focus on the problem at hand and call on their experience and expertise to solve it.

‍

Dr. Laura Maguire (our favorite cognitive systems researcher) wrote about this in her dissertation¹,

“It is noted that the practices of incident management work very differently than domain models suggest and the tooling designed to aid coordination incurs a cognitive cost for practitioners.” 

Finding places to reduce that cognitive cost of coordination is something we take seriously at Jeli, and it continues to inform the decisions we make as we develop incident management solutions. 

‍

We didn’t stop at our IR Bot with these updates; there’s more! We’ve also been hard at work making the sign up and onboarding experience into the Jeli platform easier for everyone. Testing out a new product, or even learning to do incident analysis for the first time, is difficult to do without data to play with. We’ve added sandbox incident data to a new demo environment so that you don’t even have to use your own data to get started with Jeli. You can even use it before you connect your Slack workspace with Jeli. 

‍

We’ve got some more exciting things cooking that we can’t wait to share!

‍

Don’t have Jeli yet? Get started with a free trial of Jeli today to respond to, manage, and analyze incidents in order to build more resilient infrastructure and teams.

‍

References:

1. Dr. Laura Maguire, Controlling the Costs of Coordination in Large-scale Distributed Software Systems. 2020, The Ohio State University

‍