A data visualization dashboard that provides actionable insights to markters
82%
Adoption intent among surveyed users
+15%
Users willing to pay 15% more for the new feature
-75%
Time to insight for marketers
Time
2022.02 - 2022.07
My Role
Solo Product Designer
Solo UX Researcher
Team
CMO/ PM
CTO
Designer (me)
Platform
Upped Events is a B2B platform for small-sized event planning and management, connecting event owners, staff, and attendees.
Problem
Our primary clients—small event owners—are forced to use time-consuming and costly external marketing tools, as our platform currently doesn't include marketing analytics features.
Business goal
Integrate email marketing analytics function to reduce churn and grow our user base by creating a complete product ecosystem.
Design goal
Build an integrated analytics dashboard that provides users with intuitive email marketing insights for their events.
01 Research & Initial Design
The research revealed marketer's dissatisfactions towards existing products, and the improvement opportunities:
😒
Dissatisfactions
✦ Low visibility of performance
✦ Lack well-defined metrics.
✦ Not enough subscriber data.
✦ Not enough customer- targeted automation.
🤗
Opportunities
⭐ Real-time event analytics
⭐ Well-defined email KPIs
⭐ Data-driven subscriber profile
⭐ AI-powered customer segmentation
I facilitated cross-functional workshops with PM and CTO to unify project goals and scope, and created quick mockups.
Insight group 1: Event + Email
✦ Marketing activities overview
✦ Email activities overview
✦ Email activities detail
✦ Event performance analysis
Insight group 2: Subscribers
✦ Subscribers activity overview
✦ Subscribers
✦ Subscribers demographics analysis
I collaborated with PM in multiple feedback rounds & intensive iterative design.
02 User-Driven Redesign
Integrating feedback for meaningful impact
I delivered a comprehensive dashboard design to the team
However, we encountered significant pushback from end-users.
We presented the design to 5 end-users, and the results were eye-opening
All 5 found the dashboard hard to digest
3 out of 5 couldn't find "significant" analytics they needed
Why the first design failed to meet user needs?
To seek expert opinions, I reached out to marketers and designers online, since the startup doesn't had enough resources.
Feedback summarize
"The present dashboard is cluttered with fragmented data. The output is unclear, difficult to act on, and lacks revenue insights for effective decisions."
->
HMW…
Redesign the analytics dashboard to be intuitive, insightful, and performance-driven?
🎯 Design Challenge 1 :
Craft Intuitive Information Architecture
I created a granularity-based structure diagram, moving from broad marketing activities to specific email and subscriber analyses.
Structure Before:
😵A data rabbit hole
Vision1: Email Marketing Insight
Marketing
Event
Vision 2: Customer Insight
Subscriber
Subscriber
Structure After:
✨Easy to digest
Vision1: Email Marketing Insight
Marketing
Event
Vision 2: Customer Insight
Subscriber
🎯 Design Challenge 2:
Design Insightful Metric Displays
Users can't quickly find significant metrics in current design.
To identify the most crucial email marketing metrics, I conducted extensive desk research and competitive analysis.
Integrated with the resesarch insights, we selected essential performance indicators to present, including delivery rate, open rate, and click-through rate.
However, marketers still looked overwhelmed.😵💫.
⏱️ “I only have 30 secs for this section!”
I iterated the card design to between insightful and easy to grasp.
Before
Redundant data
Related info too sparse
After
Simplified data
Related info close
The final metric board design is easy to digest!
🎯 Design challenge 3
Build Performance-Driven Visualizations
Users complaints with this Event & Email data analytics
"Confusing"
"Trivial"
We tried to simplify the diagram while maintaining information density.
However, early iterations became either too simple or complex, failed to present information effectively.
After discussion, we decided to use chart to replace graphs.
New Event Performance Chart:
✓ Essential context ✓ Financial driven ✓ Allow for scaling
New Email Activities Chart
✓ Present top-performed emails
✓ Allow successful email duplicate
This approach integrated the all 3 design principles - "intuitive", "actionable" and "driving financial results," achieving a 95% positive feedback rate from users😄.
Now, let's connect all the dots and see the final product:
We made another survey with the mockups, and…
🥳🚀 98% event owners can't wait to see this dashboard being shipped!
What I Learned
Not all data is equally valuable. Focusing on actionable and financially relevant metrics is crucial.
To identify key issues sooner, you need to conduct more user testings in the early stages.