Guided by Research:
Applying UX Research Principles to Maximize User Value
Our team was tasked with creating a dashboard visualizing the health of our professional services business. This will be leveraged by our executive team to make both short and long term decisions on policies governing our teams’ time. We decided we needed more information to create the most value and leaned on UX research principles to guide us in creating the best possible user experience.
Our first step was interviewing stakeholders to define their needs and understand how they intended to leverage this dashboard in their decision making process. We found that these users cared about quick wins and the ability to see a high-level snapshot of their teams.
From our interviews we learned that we had two main user personas to create - our executive team who is making policy changes/updates and our operations teams who manage those policy changes and the affected populations. While we would prioritize the needs of our executive team in determining the metrics and levers to include we would prioritize our operations team when it came to usability testing - as they would be the primary users navigating and saving dashboard views on behalf of the executive team.
Now we turned our attention to the user experience itself. What would users see when they accessed the dashboard? How would this information be presented and how do we prevent overwhelming the user with needless details. For each persona we created a user journey map to address these questions before beginning to build the dashboard.
The most important aspect to this dashboard was ensuring the metrics we were showcasing resonated with both the health of the business and the way policy decisions are being made. To verify we were pulling out the most important details we performed A/B testing with those in our executive user persona. The results gave us confidence that we were creating something useful and necessary for the user and business.
Finally, prior to a full launch we performed usability testing with emphasis on the technical usability of the dashboard and the ability for our operations team to access details required to take policy action. What we found was that while executive personas were taking snapshots of the dashboard at a particular time the operations teams were more often digging into the user-level detail exports to take further action. By testing with both personas we were able to address specific feedback around data load times, navigating to user exports and applying additional filters.
Dashboard Launch
The final result contains the results of our A/B testing — Metric Options A. These resonated the most with both personas and provided clarity to our teams on how the business measures and evaluates success within Professional Services. We landed on a single-pane view that could be used as a snapshot in quarterly business reviews by our executive leadership. We wanted this dashboard to be useful at a high-level and allow operations teams to follow up and take further action quickly.
By prioritizing UX research methodologies in our dashboard design process we created a product that fit our audiences’ needs. We provided value to both the user and the business by surfacing quick wins — making quicker, well-informed policy decisions happen more quickly.
