Efficient Dashboard Creation with Templates

Jul 2023 - Aug 2023

The Security Dashboard offers a quick view of an organization's cybersecurity status. However, increasing widget options have caused user confusion due to high customization. To address this, I designed a template feature that reduced dashboard creation time by 95%.

My Role

Team: 1 Product Manager, 1 UX Designer (Me), 1 Visual Designer, 1 Technical Writer, and 5+ Software Engineers.

As a UX designer, upon receiving the request, I took several actions:

Cross-functional collaboration

Led the end-to-end design process, collaborating closely with cross-functional teams, including product managers and engineers.

User Research

Collaborated with product manager to gather user feedback and utilize qualitative and quantitative data to create high-quality designs.

Design

Proposed various designs and adjusted them to ensure feasibility with engineers.

BUSINESS GOAL

Promote feature sets on the platform to maximize upsell opportunities.

The Security Dashboard is one of the most frequently visited services on our platform, with 12% of users visiting it almost daily.

We aim to enhance visibility into different feature sets, increasing user engagement with other features.

Enterprise customers demanded improvements to the current RBAC system, indicating that it did not meet their needs. Without enhancements, they were reluctant to continue purchasing the Trend Micro platform.

USER PROBLEM

Imagine you are a security team member who needs to view the dashboard every day to monitor the company's security. However, when creating the dashboard, you find that there are too many widgets to choose from, and you can't find the related widgets that can compose a coherent story.

DEFINE PROBLEM

How might we efficiently enable users to create a dashboard with cohesive information?

DESIGN OUTCOMES

01 Provide templates in the Security Dashboard.

“There are too many widgets. I don't know which ones to pick for my dashboard.”

Based on user feedback from product managers, I designed an end-to-end process that allows users to create dashboards by directly selecting templates, reducing the time needed to create a dashboard.

02 Showcase the cohesive story of the template.

“I can't tell which widgets are related to each other.”

By providing dashboard templates, we have grouped related widgets together. However, the next challenge is how to present the template and help the user understand how to read it?

Proposal A

Template with Guidance

Clear Guidance

Guides users through dashboard navigation and widget use effectively.

Inconsistency

Each template's guidance may vary slightly.

Maintenance Challenges

Needs regular updates for new template introductions.

Proposal B

Dashboard Presentation

Unclear Widget Relationship

Users might struggle with widget relationship comprehension.

Easy Maintenance

Uses directly generated presentations post-template creation, reducing extra design work.

Final Design

After discussions with the design team, I decided to combine the strengths of proposals A and B to create the final design.

Clear Guidance

Guides users through dashboard navigation and widget use effectively.

Ensure Consistency

Adjust the method of showcasing templates to ensure consistent design across different templates.

DESIGN IMPACT

Dashboard Creation Time

95%

Number of Dashboard

2.53x

LESSON LEARNED

How to understand users without research resources?

In this project, there was no researcher involvement. Initially, I felt uncertain and didn’t quite know how to adjust the design. However, through collaboration with the Product Manager, we obtained data and received feedback from Sales. Eventually, I successfully completed the design.

I learned that even without research resources, leveraging other company resources can help gather user feedback, and as the saying goes, "Focus on the user and all else will follow."

In this project, there was no researcher involvement. Initially, I felt uncertain and didn’t quite know how to adjust the design. However, through collaboration with the Project Manager, I obtained data and received feedback from Sales. Eventually, we successfully completed the design. I learned that even without research resources, leveraging other company resources can help gather user feedback, and as the saying goes, "Focus on the user and all else will follow."

STAKEHOLDERS FEEDBACK

Not only was Zoe a very talented designer, but she was very thoughtful and aware of the customer: whether she was recommending user experience flows and design enhancements that were more beneficial to the customer, or recommending that we learn more about how the persona would interact or attempt to solve their problem to ensure a top notch design. We would also review existing designs to learn more about how we could improve them, based on what we've learned from data and customer interviews.

Michael Habibi (Director of Product Management)

Michael Habibi

(Director of Product Management)