Inclusivv Analytics Dashboard
From Design Sprint to Production for Customer Admin Analytics
Summary
Our customers at Inclusivv (formerly Civic Dinners) needed deeper insights into the important conversations they were facilitating with their audiences, so that they could learn what was working and could report on their successes to stakeholders. In my first month at Inclusivv, I introduced the Product Development team to new processes of discovery, exploration, and design that we used to collaborate in order to deliver an analytics dashboard to customers. In this project I leveraged methodologies such as a design sprint, wireframing, prototyping, user interviews, and usability testing.
Goals
Improve the admin site portal for customers, where they manage their conversations
Understand and deliver on a customer need to provide more insights into conversation engagement
Introduce the Product Development team to UX and design methodologies, while including their perspectives for a solution
Deliver results on a key objective for the company in my first quarter at Inclusivv
Role
Design Sprint Facilitation
User Interviews / Usability Tests
Product Design
Quality Assurance
Process
In my third week at Inclusivv (formerly Civic Dinners) as Head of Product and Design, I facilitated a two-day Design Sprint with the Product Development team focused on enhancing the platform’s admin site for customers. I inherited the product roadmap and the admin site was what I was asked by stakeholders to focus on first. The Product Manager had heard of the Design Sprint framework and was eager to include the developers in collaborative cross-functional discovery efforts they had not been exposed to at Inclusivv.
I agreed that a Sprint was a great way for us to collaborate and for us all to contribute to a solution, although I modified it to be condensed to two days instead of the prescribed five in the interest of time. Being extremely new, I was also excited that I could learn from the experience of my colleagues and they could contribute to a solution for a platform they had worked on longer than I had.
Design Sprint exercises completed in Miro and offline
Exercises completed during the two-day Sprint:
Introduction and Agenda
Long Term Goal
Insight Listening
How Might We Statements and Voting
Drawing the Map and Focus Area
Concept Sketching including notes & ideas, Crazy 8’s and final sketch
Solution Presentation and Voting
Storyboarding
Through the Sprint, we identified a focus area of the admin site which was to create a dashboard of the most valuable data for our customers to easily consume. The whole team enjoyed participating in the process and sketching their solution ideas. We all took inspiration from each of the sketches, folding them into storyboards of an ideal user journey.
After our team collaborated and agreed on a user path and contributed solution ideas that we hypothesized would meet our customers goals, I created a prototype to test with customers and created a user test guide. The guide outlined the test plan, contextual inquiry questions, and usability questions to be asked while the customer interacted with the prototype. The goal of the study was to gain perspective on customers’ current experiences with the admin site and what can be improved, while exposing them to a prototype that was based on findings from the Sprint. The prototype included a dedicated navigation and 5 pages of content, including an Analytics & Reporting section. This section displayed 11 panels, each with a title, filter, primary metric, secondary metrics, and graph. The metrics reported engagement data like number of attendees over time, the number of dinners per conversation topic, and post-dinner survey response rate. After recruiting a diverse customer pool for our remote video interviews, with the help of our Product Manager, we conducted one-hour interviews with 6 participants at 5 companies. They provided valuable insights in response to our questions.
Screen from the prototype used for usability testing
Affinity map created during synthesis of user feedback from interviews
While many insights emerged after analyzing the interview results, I’d like to highlight a few key insights I surfaced that we could act on as a platform team that would bring value and delight to our customers. Our hypothesis of a need for centralized, high-level metrics was resoundingly validated, with one participant responding to the analytics dashboard with “This is going to be my end all be all”. By surfacing an analytics dashboard, we would arm customers with the key business metrics that they need to report on as measures of success to ultimately continue their programs and relationship with Inclusivv. Aside from insights focused on the primary questioning, we also gleaned other helpful feedback like that ‘Conversation’ and ‘Dinner’ terminology is confusing and should be addressed, as it was mentioned by all 6 participants.
Next steps in the project were to define quick wins, iterate on the prototype design based on feedback, identify what work needs more research, and record pain points and product requests that came out of the user tests. While our initiative included introducing a new home and pages for the admin site, I’ll continue to highlight the analytics portion of the site. Through the design iteration process, I reduced the number of analytics panels to 4 from the 11 we originally presented during the user tests, because the 4 we kept were the most valuable across all participants and we also wanted to keep the developer level of effort as low as possible. I worked with the team to finalize which data filters were feasible and most valuable, and reflected that in my designs.
After aligning with the team on the content and navigation for the admin site, I designed a final color version of the prototype to be used during development. As development progressed, the developers and I stayed in constant communication and met whenever there were questions about implementing or interpreting the designs. I collaborated with the tech lead on which data visualization library would be a good fit for our React-heavy tech stack, and we chose Nivo. When the release date neared, I reviewed the designs in a new formal step in the delivery process, and provided remediation details to developers to ensure style consistency.
The result of Inclusivv’s first fully collaborative product delivery process was a new admin site design with content that customers needed most to both manage their conversations and report on engagement. I also worked with the platform team to install event tracking on the admin site so that we could monitor user interactions and create conversion goals. After the tracking was in place, I created a dashboard in Data Studio to monitor engagement by customer admins with the new admin site.
Annotations for design remediations to a data panel
The admin site main dashboard and analytics panels in production
Outcome
By engaging in a collaborative discovery, exploration, and design process, our team was able to understand the user problem and goals and contribute to a solution, providing our customers with a technically informed and feasible result.
Our customers were also a partner in the creation of the admin site, providing contextual insights and usability feedback during the process, leading us to focus on the information most valuable to them and their stakeholders. This ultimately will lead to customer satisfaction and retention.
Aside from co-creating a solution, we also delivered on achieving quarterly objectives and key results for the company and platform team.
Reflections
After the Sprint, I asked for the team’s feedback in a survey, and one developer’s response to overall feedback on the Sprint process was, “I like how this process helps put mental guardrails, to focus on the actual problem and makes it easy to come up with solutions”. Ideas for how it could have been improved were to make it 3 days instead of 2, and to invite other team members outside of the platform team, especially from the customer success team. I’m thankful for my colleagues' feedback and suggestions.
I think it would be beneficial to revisit the site to learn from how our customers are engaging with it after it has been adopted by old and new customers. I would first create conversion goals that would indicate successful engagement with the admin site. Then, I would talk with customers, new ones and the ones who participated in the original study, to understand what has been helpful to them and what can be improved.