Financial Dashboard – Case Study

David Chukwuma — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 16:25:58 +0000

The solution

I ran a week of design sprints and user testing based on the user experience process, which includes four stages: discover, refine, design, and test.

My role

On this project, I was a UX generalist. I led a team of staff and stakeholders to go through a design sprint and develop ideations and deliverables. Some of the deliverables were empathy maps and journey maps. In addition, I got new insights from usability tests as we released multiple iterations of the system to the entire company.

User testing and iterations

I made sketches on whiteboards in the office after conducting interviews with the users of the platform. Finally, I designed all the use cases and tested them with users by showing them proposed sketches and workflows. I chose the user experience process because of the time constraints. Since this was software in development, implementation was fast-paced, and testing was paramount.

Dashboard iteration

Iteration summary

Had a side bar for easy navigation
Reduced colors compared to existing implementation
Cards used to display metrics
Fancy modern were charts

User-testing results

- A set of users complained about the sidebar navigation taking up much space. We decided to dig into this in more detail. We realized that on large screens, the sidebar navigation was adequate. However, 90% of users at the company used desktops with small screen sizes, less than 768px.
  The reduced colors were liked by 97% of the users.
- The cards made things easy to understand, so more cards were requested.
- We removed fancy charts and used traditional charts to increase information assimilation and reduce the learning curve. The majority of users preferred charts they already knew.
- We used responsive fonts for users with small screens. This implementation meant that no matter the screen size, the text was still legible.

Results

I created a scalable design system on Figma that allowed for changes to be made as the platform scaled. After weeks of Usability testing and A/B testing, the team developed and shipped a fully functional web dashboard that helped the C-level officers quickly digest financial information.

Across a user survey, the new dashboard increased user satisfaction from 40% to 84%. In addition, the dashboard helped management see metrics easily while increasing the “skim-ability” of the dashboard .

Lessons learned

Hindsight is 20-20 they say. I spent a good amount of time talking with C-level executives about the business goal and their perceived notion of the challenges of the marketing team. From speaking with the Marketing team I learned the actual issues they were facing. User research is a must.

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Interactive Marketing portal – Case Study

David Chukwuma — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 21:22:22 +0000

The solution

We ran several weeks of design sprints and user testing based on the design thinking methodology, which includes five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. We eventually created and shipped a fully functional web application that helped the marketing team create and manage marketing campaigns in 2 easy steps.

My role

I led a team of user experience designers to begin primary user research and define key personas, empathy maps, and journey maps. We got new insights from usability tests before we released the product to the entire marketing team. I worked on the final high-fidelity prototype, and the development team helped create the final product.

Research findings

1. Poor advert duration tracking

The marketing team had issues knowing what adverts were effective on different branches. Members of the team would copy each other on emails to the IT Team so they are aware of adverts. They also had to keep track of the advert effective dates in calendars or other ways.

3. Poor user audit

user audits were poorly managed as it was difficult to know who sent what ad to the IT team. Emails had to be grouped to keep track of add creation. If a team member forgot to copy another marketing team member then that member was oblivious to the ad creation.

2. Poor audience tracking

Emails had to be sent to know what ads were running in specific states or branches. Complex and often multiple emails between IT and marketing were needed to know if adverts were active.

4. Poor ad metrics tracking

The IT team had to create reports routinely or requested by the marketing team. Most times the IT team gave the marketing team SQL stored procedures to see the requested metrics of adverts. This was a learning curve for team members without technical expertise.

Design sprint meeting

Rapid prototyping sketches

Product features

We created a centralized advert location. The vision of the developed platform was to promote transparency and collaboration among the marketing team. The creation of the portal allowed the team to scale their efforts and focus more on planning creative ad campaigns for specific audience. The plan is to add more features to the platform as adoption increases.

Unified advert list

A place to easily keep track of adverts in their different states – inactive, active, expired, published, draft. The list also made it easy to know the audience of each advert.

Previewing system

In order to give the users the ease of previewing a created advert quickly we added the feature to preview an ad quickly and with minimal clicks. Users can preview an advert right from the list, the creation page, and a special audience simulation page.

Targeted Audience – locations and branches

The platforms gave users the ability to target specific audiences across locations and branches in real-time.

User audits

Users are able to see who did what on the platform, thus encouraging team transparency.

Ad reports

Ad performance metrics are shown in real-time

API simulator

The team wanted a way to preview adverts for any location or branch they wanted. So we designed an API simulator that made it easy to query the ad showing in a location and see the details of the ad.

Sample Design guideline artifact to developers

User Testing

It was great to see the smiles on the faces of the marketing team when we unveiled the product to them. Because they were involved in the process, they felt like they were looking at their creation. The CIO of Security finance was pleased about this because our design sprints were not in vain. The goal was to keep it simple, and I believe we achieved that. Remote User testing went great; as tricky as the pandemic made things, it was still a rewarding exercise.

Across the marketing team, we had over 90% user satisfaction from a testing survey conducted. The product simplified how the marketing team created and managed campaigns and led to a 60% reduction in the time it takes to train staff to start a marketing campaign.

Lessons learned

High-Fidelity Prototype

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Enterprise UX Archives - David Chukwuma

Financial Dashboard – Case Study

The solution

My role

User testing and iterations

Iteration summary

User-testing results

Results

Lessons learned

Interactive Marketing portal – Case Study

The solution

My role

Research findings

1. Poor advert duration tracking

3. Poor user audit

2. Poor audience tracking

4. Poor ad metrics tracking

Product features

Unified advert list

Previewing system

Targeted Audience – locations and branches

User audits

Ad reports

API simulator

Sample Design guideline artifact to developers

User Testing

Lessons learned

High-Fidelity Prototype