Storytelling with Data: Dashboard Design to Empower Clients
We designed Dashboards for clients to interact with their financial data and stop configuring and printing reports.
A loan servicing company had loads of financial data but the only way for their clients to use it was to run specialized reports. This meant they had to know date ranges, what kind of a story they were trying to build, and what numbers to compare. Often they’d print out multiple reports but it was difficult to share them in meetings because everyone would be looking at their own copy of the report.
We designed an interactive dashboard system to bring client data to life so they could interact with it in real time and discover insights for planning and forecasting. This eliminated the task of configuring and compiling reports for clients.
The goal of this project was to create interactive dashboards that clients could use for planning and forecasting. The first dashboard was tested after 2 months of interviews, observations, prototyping, testing, and iterations.
My role was to research, analyze, prototype and test the experience for clients. I developed a design system and we began to roll out new chapters of the clients' data-driven story.
Making dashboards to solve client
When we use a product, we “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we’ll hire it again. If it does a poor job, we “fire” it and look for something else to solve the problem. I used this framework to write out tasks and expected outcomes to determine which features to prioritize.
The bank’s target customers for the mobile app were Millennials, folks for whom
the smartphone is a permanent fixture of nearly every activity they undertake.
They consider traditional banking websites to be complicated and tedious, and
our research showed that they would drop a bank without hesitation solely based
on the ease of using its mobile banking app.
We also learned that a significant number of the traditional terms, labels and
language banks use everywhere in their digital products were almost completely
foreign to these users.
