Landing Page Dashboard
The Problem
Multiple quarters of prioritizing features over user experience resulted in a bloated experience that impacted way-finding for users due to a convoluted information architecture. This compromised “learnability” or adoption of new features.
Symptoms of these pains included
The initial landing page had poor engagement.
Direct user feedback about challenges navigating through the app or returning to certain screens/experiences.
High volume of support tickets dedicated to completing “basic” tasks across all features.
The solution
The ideal solution would be an IA overhaul. Audit the entire experience, optimize and implement. But it wasn’t feasible, because of time and resource constraints. We needed an intermediary solution that the team could deliver quickly to increase value for users sooner.
I proposed an alternative solution of refreshing the landing page to personalize the experience and provide shortcuts to the most relevant features via a net new dashboard experience including experimentation as a means of validation which was a new practice for the team.
Impact
At kickoff, we defined KPIs for the dashboard itself (↑WAU among test group) and during the process performance indicators for the individual modules. The dashboard was implemented shortly after I left the company. The ultimate goal being that increasing engagement would positively impact customer retention.
Key Learnings
Getting buy-in on the concept of experimentation was a bigger challenge than I had anticipated.
My Role
I was a player/coach on this project. I functioned as lead designer and managed a Product Designer and Product Manager through this who worked with a team of engineers.
Below are some snapshots from the process.
Before
This is the landing page before the refresh
User Feedback Loop
Insights Gathering To get started we needed in-depth research insights across all journeys and features to understand what should be included on the dashboard. So I facilitated an activity with members from the portfolio and insights from customer support, sales and implementation to map out a holistic picture. This activity was successful in helping us identify themes, opportunities and most important focus for the dashboard. It was also very effective in hi-lighting knowledge gaps or themes for further research and analysis.
*This is a recreation of a workspace that got lost in a MIRO to Figjam migration
Solutioning exploration Insights from the mapping activity directly influenced initial dashboard layouts which were centered around actual personalized use cases. Again these exercises helped focus modules on addressing known and existing user problems.
Planning Dashboards are a powerful representation of simplified complexity. I drove planning for the dashboard modules to map out iterations, use cases, testing groups and performance indicators. We also included here, what areas for research that came up in the scenario mapping activity.
Why go the experimentation route?
Because the problem area was well defined and risk was low. The existing experience wasn’t providing much value. This wasn’t a multi step flow and we’d be leveraging familiar patterns from the design system. In this context volume was essential for testing this hypothesis. However qualitative research would be essential for understanding how to evolve modules beyond v1 and identifying new modules to include.
But with big refreshes, comes great responsibility. The dashboard would only be turned on for a very small carefully selected population who could opt out. During planning we defined milestones for evaluating analytics, “making a decision/iterating” and talking to users about their experience using it and gaining insights on how to evolve it (The most blissful relationships are those between qualitative and quantitative data).
Explorations for interaction and user interface.
After core modules and functionality were nailed down, the designer conducted a competitive analysis and patterning exploration and did many explorations on the module UI, keeping in mind these new components would become part of our burgeoning design system.
