Complexity Made Simple

The Problem

Imagine you’re a school administrator. You want to create a visual for the next school board meeting, but the pre-built dashboards in your data analytics tool don’t match what you need. You click a button to create a new dashboard and you’re met with nothing ... a blank page with no indication of what to do next.

That was the problem facing us when we started the dashboard builder redesign. The most common response to the scenario above is that they would call their product advisor to ask for a custom dashboard, but that took time and resources away from other clients. Our data showed clients were willing to create dashboard themselves. They just didn’t know how.

Discovery Research

I started by completing a competitive analysis of existing popular dashboard builders, creating a matrix of features and determining which were available in each product, which settings could be turned on or changed, and which were the default settings, and compared that to the existing tool, which fell short on many levels. I also completed a heuristic evaluation of the current tool to identify general opportunities for improvement.

Armed with this information, I met with the stakeholders (the product owners/advisors and the head of development) and discussed pain points, client-requested features, advisor-requested features, and overall usability. We also discussed the types of users who would be using the application, using personas created earlier for the suite of applications, and brainstormed some solutions to the pain points, discussing features that could be built in a reasonable timeframe, as well as solutions that would work for all the products.

Design

I met with the product owners and SMEs for each product separately to discuss issues unique to their products, as well as what they had heard from clients. Based on these discussions and my previous research, I thought providing templates would be the easiest way to encourage clients to try the tool and would allow us to meet the bar of user expectations for a dashboard tool. The product owners wanted a wizard to walk users through the basics. I started with wireframes for those two ideas.

Redesign

Focusing the design on advisors rather than clients meant moving away from a wizard and back into a more complex UI. Several rounds of wireframes were produced and reviewed by the whole team for input.

When introduced to development, there was additional discussion around features and what was feasible, and additional edits were made. This included removing the templating feature since there wasn't enough time to build it out.

Because the long-term goal was still to encourage clients to try the tool for themselves, the MVP design focused on making each page more intuitive and included a stepped navigation to make the steps clearer.

Results

The dashboard builder redesign was initially launched with one product (5Maps) when that product's redesign was also launched. Initial client feedback at the conference and to advisors was positive, and client use increased, especially after additional training. Further iterations focused on making the product more aligned with competitors were planned.