Creating a card-based, customisable dashboard
The goal was to build a flexible dashboard that, through personalisation, would become invaluable to users from across all roles in the organisation.
Feedback has been very positive with customers relying on it daily for a top-level view of the metrics they care about it.
The personas
We have four well defined personas that we worked towards on the first release of our customisable dashboard:
- CTO
- VP of sales
- Product manager
- Ad operations
Early design explorations
To begin with I tried to focus the information around a handful of our key metrics spread across some of the most popular dimensions. This lead to a screen where we could visualise views, ad impressions and fill rate across videos, domains and devices.
The information was useful but the approach had some serious flaws: our data is so multi-dimensional and the interest of the different personas so varied that this was never going to satisfy everyone.
A card-based approach
Based on early impressions and feedback we realised we needed a system whereby different members of an organisation could view different data on their dashboards. A customisable, card-based approach made the most sense for our next design exploration.
Keep it simple
We were getting closer but the cards were too complicated and started to go against one of the main objectives of a dashboard: they were becoming analytical tools themselves rather than just serving as signals that point to areas that might require deeper analysis.
Also having date pickers, filters and settings per card meant that, not only were they visually cluttered, but it would be very tedious to analyse a specific dimension, eg. mobile performance, across multiple metrics in one go.
Current status
This is going to be a long, ongoing project but the first full version that we're aiming for allows users to have multiple boards and to resize and reorder the cards on each board. So far we have a public release where users can have one board and they can choose which cards to display.
Feedback so far has been very positive, the dashboard has started to replace multiple tools that were being used previously and is proving accesible to various persona types.
