Financial Dashboard – Case Study

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 results

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.

• • 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.

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 🕺🏾.

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.