IDP Analytics Dashboard
➡️ Check out this project on Behance:
Summary
Introduction
Briefing
The second project at Level 1 in Aela MID Bootcamp is to create an analytics Dashboard interface for a company from one of the following categories:
- A coffee machine company (eg. Nespresso, Dolce Gusto); or
- Banks (from Brazil or anywhere in the world); or
- School or university; or
- Online game; or
- Electronics brand (Samsung, LG, etc.); or
- Travel agency; or
- Digital Metrics Startup (Social Network analytics, etc.).
At this level, the goal is to design a web page in standard format, with no focus on responsiveness and mobile.
Project deliverables
After the discover, define and develop stages, expected project deliverables are:
- UX Wireframes
- Style guide
- Visual design proposal
- Analytics dashboard prototype
Discover
About IDP
The Brazilian Institute of Education, Development and Research (IDP) is a higher education institute with headquarters in Brasília and São Paulo, Brazil. It was founded around 20 years ago offering undergraduate and graduate programmes in Law. Today, IDP has a Law School, a Business and Management School and a Media and Communications School. The institution offers over 20 options of courses, including undergraduate programmes, specialisations, MBAs, Masters and Doctorate programmes.
- Company History & Business Goals
- Training the members of the professions and vocations of the teaching areas contemplated in the institution;
- Encouraging research and preparing scholars to extend the frontiers of knowledge;
- Having a satisfactory number of enrollments in all educational programmes;
- Increasing the production of academic knowledge both in quantity and quality by having a judicious selection process of the best candidates.
IDP was founded in 1998 aiming to become a qualified Law study centre. It started its institutional trajectory as a teaching and research establishment in the postgraduate courses, then adding a Masters programme and then bachelors degree. In expanding its educational perspectives, IDP is looking to consolidate as an independent think tank that seeks to contribute to the academic debate about the social, political and economic changes in Brazil, especially problematizing the challenges and trends linked to the public sector.
The business' main business goals include:
- IDP's Students
As a premium institution, IDP's price point is considerably high considering the average income in Brazil: R$80k (about £12k) for the Masters in Law, for instance. For that reason, most of the students come from high-income families. In the undergraduate courses, the vast majority of the students live in Distrito Federal, while the graduate programmes have students from other parts of Brazil as well.
About the users
IDP has different teams for each category of products, like the undergraduate programmes, Masters and Doctorate in Law, Masters in Economics and Business, etc. For each of them there is a Smarketing team promoting and selling the products in that particular category. The Marketing Analysts manage digital campaigns and other efforts to generate leads and as they move through the Marketing and Sales funnel there are a lot of KPIs and metrics to monitor.
The Marketing team needs to monitor and provide reports on the publicity campaigns, website traffic, downloads, new leads and more, while the Sales team generates reports on the leads that became opportunities and, ultimately, customers.
Primary goals
Generate a high volume of qualified leads
Nurture leads until purchase
Regularly report on ROI and convertion rates
Secondary goals
Grow and maintain thought leadership
Reduce customer acquisition costs
User interviews
We talked to 3 people from the Smarketing team, all of whom already use the current analytics dashboard from IDP. They shared some of their impressions and issues with it and, from that, some patterns emerged:
- The current version is truncated and doesn't allow personalised views;
- Switching pages resets the calendar view and the user needs to manually adjust it every time;
- When the user needs data from different pages the process becomes confusing and time-consuming;
- When there's a "leak" in the funnel it's really difficult to determine where, because the dashboard only reports part of the funnel.
Current Version
The Marketing team uses a platform with a very limited analytics dashboard and the system doesn't fully integrate with the educational CRM used by the Sales team. Because of that, some reports and data don't account for the whole customer journey from Awareness to Purchase.
To help provide a more visual dashboard for the managers, some developers built a solution on Google Data Studio. However, it still has many limitations and only accounts for the Marketing funnel, not the Sales funnel:
Analytics Dashboards & graphics
A data dashboard is a tool that provides a centralised and interactive means of monitoring, measuring, analysing and extracting relevant business insights from different datasets in key areas while displaying information in an intuitive and visual way.
In essence, they offer users a comprehensive overview of their company’s goals, initiatives, processes, or projects. These are measured through key performance indicators (KPIs), which provide insights that help foster growth and improvement.
There are 4 general subtypes of dashboards:
- Strategic: focused on long-term strategies and high-level metrics
- Operational: shows shorter time frames and operational processes.
- Analytical: includes context, comparisons, and history, along with subtler performance evaluators.
- Tactical: used by mid-management to track performance.
Sources: Data Pine | EN Academic
In this project, we'll be focusing on the Analytical type.
Charts, maps, and infographics help people understand complicated data, find patterns, identify trends, and tell a story. But data is only valuable if you know how to visualise it and give context, that's why choosing the right chart for presentation is so important. According to Infogram, there are 4 main types of charts: Comparison, Relationship, Composition and Distribution.
General guidelines for selecting the right type include determining how many variables to show, how many data points to display and how to scale the axis. Line, bar and column charts represent change over time. Pyramids and pie charts display parts-of-a-whole. While scatter plots and treemaps are helpful if you have a lot of data to visualize.
Define
Personas, Journey Map and Task Analysis
To generate a clearer understanding of the internal public at IDP that uses analytics dashboards, we created some personas based on real employees:
This step helped to better understand some users pain points before moving on to potential solutions.
Based on research and interviews, we did a journey map to better grasp what users go through and identify opportunities improve their experience.
Then, to learn how we can help users achieve their goals easily and efficiently, we did a simple task analysis:
Benchmarking
In order to set expectations, identify best practices and pinpoint performance gaps that could lead to improvement, we studied some other companies' analytics dashboards.
Benchmarking conclusions
A good analytics dashboard:
- Leads with key data;
- Uses different views;
- Uses consistent design language and color scheme;
- Provides context;
- Shows relevant KPIs;
- Uses the right type of chart;
- Prioritises simplicity.
Problem Statement
The Discover stage demonstrated the current solution used at IDP doesn't actually help visualise and optimise the Marketing and Sales process. Some issues include:
- Truncated navigation;
- Limited customisation;
- Not all relevant KPIs are included;
- Lack of charts in some pages;
- Information architecture doesn't prioritise most important metrics.
Problem Statement: IDP's current analytics dashboard for the Smarketing team is difficult to navigate and shows incomplete information. Our solution should deliver a page that makes the process of monitoring and reporting easier and simpler for them.
Hypothesis
We believe that redesigning an Analytics Dashboard using UX Design principles and dashboard design best practices will help IDP's Smarketing teams be more productive and work more in sync.
Based on learnings from the previous steps of this project, this should:
- Include and prioritise most relevant KPIs;
- Provide charts to help visualise data;
- Include data from the whole Smarketing funnel;
- Have straightforward navigation;
- Allow customised views and panels.
Develop
Prioritisation
To determine the elements of our dashboard, we listed existing and missing features and prioritised each of them.
Sketches
Considering the problems and hypothesis mentioned in the previous stages, I did some sketches on paper:
Wireframes
To consolidate the ideas that came up on the sketches and refine them, I designed a low-fi wireframe:
Suggestions:
1. Prominently show high priority metrics;
2. Include personalisation options, such as filters, calendar, etc;
3. Navigation to different pages and menus to access other metrics;
4. Allow user to export available content and reports;
5. Allow user to contact support from the dashboard.
