Summary - Dashboard

Maropost Dashboard is the landing page of the Maropost website where a digital marketer lands upon logging into the platform. The dashboard is expected to provide an overview to a digital marketer about the performance of the campaigns sent out to the customers, the deliverability rate of the campaigns, details about scheduled campaigns, subscriber summary, total revenue earned and overall brand performance. This information is presented in various widgets that the user can choose from a list of available widgets and personalize the dashboard as per their preferences.

The Challenge

Maropost Dashboard serves a central location for businesses to monitor and analyze performance of their marketing strategies. The challenge is to re-design the dashboard in a way that it allows businesses to efficiently track their performance and ensure they are consistently understanding and delivering on their time sensitive, data driven tasks to meet organizational goals and build brand value in the market.

Design Process Overview

Research

Evaluative research was conducted in the form of interviews (qualitative) and surveys (quantitative) to uncover insights on what kind of data the users keep track of on a daily basis, what are the takeaways they have looking at the data and what kind of actions that knowledge drives.

User Interviews

A group of 10 users were identified as the ideal research participants to have one-on-one interviews with. Open ended discussions were initiated around the following areas:

• How can they become better at what they do and how can Maropost help achieve that?

• What information is important to keep track of on a daily basis so you know what is happening with your campaigns?

• What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business?

• How do you currently keep track of your campaign and list health?

Survey

Survey was sent out to a pool of 60 Maropost users to quantify the findings uncovered during the interviews.

UX Audit

Step 1: Business Goals and Objective

The first step in UX Audit was to understand the business goals and objective i.e. what it is that the primary users of the dashboard try to achieve through the use of the dashboard and how they plan to use the information obtained from the dashboard. This was done by drafting a research questionnaire that would require feedback from clients in our research pool to obtain answers on the following questions:

Step 2: Research & Review Data

Qualitative (user interviews) and quantitative (surveys) research was conducted to understand how Maropost users expect their dashboard to be and what kind of information they want to look at when on the dashboard page. The following insights were uncovered:

• The top 5 widgets that a majority of the users find useful on the dashboard are:
  Subscriber Summary
  Calendar
  Deliverability Score
  Performance Summary
  Recent Updated Lists

• Users want to be able to arrange widgets freely on their dashboard page based on the order of priority

• Users want to see data in a more digestible and comprehensible format - infographic rather than completely data driven

Step 3: Design and Usability – Problems

During UX Audit design & usability problems were discovered with the dashboard. The following problems surfaced in regards to the top 3 widgets used on the dashboard :

Widget: Deliverability Score

• Lack of Context: There is no indication of what Deliverability Score is which can be a problem for a novice user.

• No Flexibility: There is no indication of the timeline for which the deliverability score is being displayed. It says 30 days “Deliverability Score” but is it the previous 30 days counting the current day in or is it 30 days of the month.

• Information not conveyed effectively: For the user to be able to see whether their performance has improved or dropped as compared to the previous cycle on the basis of rise or fall in the deliverability score, a filter option should be available. The current design doesn’t have the ability to show the deliverability score for the previous month and how it has changed over time.

Widget: Calendar

• Information not leading to action: The monthly calendar is simply displaying the dates with message icon against a few dates. There is no indication of the criticality of the information being displayed, whether the user still needs to take an action on the items or if the action item is complete.

Widget: Growth Summary

• Too much information: The chart consists of all numerical data without any graphics which can be too much for a user to comprehend as it increases the cognitive load.

• No flexibility: No flexibility to the user to modify/filter the timeline to see growth summary of a specific month or within a specific time period. If the user wants to see data for Feb 2019, how does do that? There is no visible option to do that and therefore, no flexibility.

• No visual hierarchy: No visual indication of growth or fall in the number/percentage of the 5 metrics (new subscribers / unsubscribed / bounced / growth / total subscribers). The month headers are located at the bottom in an almost similar font color and size which can confuse a novice user.

• Repetition: Repetition of headers across rows.

• Absence of interactive elements: The elements don’t look clickable. No drill down facility if the user wants to have a detailed view of the growth metrics of a specific month.

Heuristic Analysis

Heuristic analysis of the dashboard was conducted and the current dashboard design violated the following heuristic principles:

Visibility of System Status

The areas in the dashboard shown below do not comply with the first heuristic principle of ”Visibility of System Status”.

In the first figure, the user should be able to see how close the user is to the ideal deliverability rate. There is numerical indication of 91.11% however, a visual representation if the ideal score is 100% would be quicker for the user to look and analyze.

In the second figure showing the calendar, there is no indication of what the message icons against some dates represent, if they’ve been read, if they remain to be read.

Match between the system and Real world

The growth summary section of the dashboard does not comply with the second heuristic principle of ”Match between the system and real world”.  The headers of a table are usually located at the top and that is where the user is conditioned to look for the heading of a column. However, in this case (indicated by the red arrow), month headers are located at the bottom in an almost similar font colour and size which can confuse the user.

Consistency and Standards

This design is also in violation of Consistency and Standards Heuristic principle because the header at the bottom of the table is not the norm.

Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

The current design is not flexible when it comes to dealing with a variety of situations such as comparison. User should be able to understand if the changes in the values of various metrics are overall good or bad for the organization but with the current representation, user doesn’t have the flexibility to see that upfront.

The user is forced to look at the given metrics without any flexibility to change the timeline / date range in case he wants to compare the growth / changes over the past few months. There is no visual representation of data or the option for the user to look at this numerical data visually for better understanding.

User should have the flexibility to see the information in different forms – bars and graphs because all numerical representation can get overwhelming.

Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

Minimalist design is about making sure that everything shown to the user is necessary and useful and that the design is not cluttered as that draws the attention of the user away from what is important. In the current design, there is repetition of row headers across the table which is not required and is taking up unnecessary space which can be used to display other important information.

Findings

The dashboard offers over 20 widgets displaying different metrics and analytics data around digital marketing performance of a brand is an information heavy page. In the current dashboard, the user flow seems to show that the user doesn’t take any action-oriented steps because the information shown by the dashboard is just information and doesn’t trigger any actions. This is a pain point for a user as looking at the dashboard they might want to understand what next steps can they take to improve the performance of their campaigns or to make sure that they are not missing campaign deadlines and there are no overdue tasks. The current design is not enabling them to do that. The UX Audit & Heuristic Analysis conducted on the dashboard uncovered the following major issues with the original dashboard:

• The original Maropost dashboard was a page that had gaps in the user experience and was un-intuitive

• There was no way for a user to understand how they could add and arrange widgets without messing up their dashboard view

• The newly added widgets would get added to the bottom of the page with no visual confirmation that it had been added causing the user to scroll through the entire dashboard to see if the widget had actually been added

• The widgets did not communicate the data in a digestible format making it difficult for the user to understand what they are looking at

• There were no filtering options for users to see data between custom dates

• The widget labels were not effective in communicating what information they are conveying

Proposal

The ideas proposed for dashboard redesign would improve the user experience in the following ways:

• User can add/remove widgets and see a confirmation of that action without having to scroll through the entire page

• The widgets are responsive in size allowing the user to arrange them freely and customize the dashboard as per their needs

• Each widget has filtering and sorting option allowing user to look at the desired information

• Users can look at data in an infographic format for better understanding and improved comprehensibility

• Make the overall design interactive and clickable so that the user can drill down and view details of different sections.

DASHBOARD - BEFORE

DASHBOARD - AFTER (Wireframe)

DASHBOARD - AFTER (High Fidelity)

Impact

A post release analysis of Maropost dashboard usage depicted an overall increase of 68% in the number of people who visited dashboard and spent more than 2 minutes interacting with widgets, using filtering options to obtain relevant metrics and data thereby helping them get a better understanding of how their brand campaigns were performing.

(Data courtesy: GainSight PX)