Remediation is where conversation finally becomes action — across Lightspeed, AAP and Satellite. That meant three tools, three teams, three UI conventions and three different mental models of what "remediation" even means. To make things stranger, the button labeled "Remediate" actually generated a playbook instead of remediating. The symptom and the disease, both at once.
We reframed "Playbook" as "Remediation plan", introduced a drawer-and-cart pattern that lets users collect issues across capabilities, and made the "Remediate" button actually mean remediate. The result is a single workflow that holds up across all three products.
Research and discovery
The users here are sysadmins and platform engineers carrying remediation across a fleet. Some of them live in Lightspeed, others live in AAP, and most operate somewhere between the two, with Satellite providing the inventory model. The design problem was to make the whole workflow feel like one thing, no matter where it started or ended.
I ran a structured heuristic evaluation of the existing remediation workflow and documented 54 distinct issues across pre-remediation, execution and post-remediation. That single artifact ended up shifting leadership conversations from "polish the existing flow" to "the model is wrong" in one meeting.
The button labeled "Remediate" didn't actually remediate. The button was the symptom; the playbook-as-only-output was the disease.
Once that pattern had a name, the redesign more or less followed from it. Adoption data backed the direction up too: quarterly readouts in 2023 showed nearly 3,000 remediations executed per quarter, which gave us real usage to work against rather than assumptions.
Key UX moves
1Reframed "Playbook" as "Remediation plan"
This was a conceptual shift, not a rename. A plan can hold manual steps, automated steps, scheduling and dependencies. A playbook simply can't. Changing the noun changed the design problem and gave the team a shared object that made sense in all three products. It's also the natural next step from Pathways — where pathways aggregate recommendations into a unit of work, plans take that unit and actually execute it.
2From wizard to drawer/cart pattern
The old wizard forced a single-tab linear flow. If a sysadmin wanted to gather issues from Advisor, Vulnerability and Compliance into one remediation, every tab reset the context. The drawer pattern lets them accumulate issues across all four capabilities into one plan without losing track of where they were in the first place.
3System-centric instead of issue-centric
The existing entry points started from "an issue" and asked you "which systems." Internal data actually showed the opposite — users preferred starting from "a system" and resolving all of its issues together. The redesign moved the system back to being the primary unit, and the "Remediate" button moved to system views, where it could finally mean what it says.
4What we cut
The old "Create playbook" flow used to end with "Go back to application." Not "Execute." Not "Download." The action that completed the workflow was a navigation, not a resolution. We cut it. The flow now ends where users expect it to end — at a decision about what to actually do next.
Challenges
Coordinating with the AAP and Satellite teams in parallel rather than upstream meant that some of the cross-product alignment had to happen after architectural decisions had already been made. The remediation-plan model held up well — but the seam between in-product execution (Lightspeed) and at-scale execution (AAP) still feels like a handoff in places where it really should feel like a continuation.
High fidelity walkthrough
Shipped in Red Hat Lightspeed. The remediation workflow is live in the Hybrid Cloud Console, with Red Hat publishing the announcement, the documentation and the customer-portal explainer alongside it.
Read the Red Hat announcement →
Lightspeed Remediations guide →
Final takeaways
- When a button label and the action it triggers don't match, the conceptual model underneath is broken. Naming the disease, not just the symptom, is the first real design move.
- A drawer-and-cart pattern is the right shape whenever users need to accumulate context across surfaces. Wizards quietly punish any kind of lateral exploration.
- Heuristic evaluation can be a leadership tool, not just a research one. Cataloguing 54 issues with severity is what shifted the conversation from "polish" to "rebuild" in a single meeting.
- What I'd push harder for next time: joint design with AAP and Satellite from the very start. Seams between products are far easier to design upstream than to retrofit once the model is already in place.
Public proof and customer evidence
Principled Technologies study (commissioned by Red Hat, October 2024) tested a 90-host RHEL environment, manual scripting vs Lightspeed automated remediation. (Source)
- 86% less time on known issues (the public headline)
- 79% less time on critical CVEs
- 76% less unplanned downtime
- $103,500 average annual benefit per 100 servers
"Previously, we could only view monthly reports. With Red Hat Lightspeed we have real-time visibility that helps us make smarter decisions about processes."
Tomago Aluminium · Red Hat customer case study
Read the Tomago Aluminium case →