Dashboard

For SAAS E-Commerce Platform

New Dashboard as digital platform switches pricing models

Evolving from a subscription based platform to an a la carte subscription model is a large task when you have thousands of active users. As modernized sections of the platform are rolled out, the existing Dashboard is becoming stale.

  • I worked on the MVP dashboard which will act more as a landing page for users until more functionality is added to the greater product experience.

  • Although the target audience is every one of existing and potential subscribers, the MVP version of the dashboard is for beta users who are using an early version of the projected product.

  • My role on this project included planning and creating mockups and writing the UX copy.

Whiteboarding Session1 of 3.

Sketches

I typically have whiteboarding sessions with my team. This enables us to work out potential problems, and collect all of our ideas so that we can see everything at one time.

  • In this case, my sketches helped map out the user flow.

  • I returned to the whiteboard on two more occasions to work through unexpected hiccups.


Widgets for the people...

The early stages of planning are a group effort, with design working alongside the development team. Introducing dashboard widgets was an idea that gained traction very quickly. We were all excited to give our licensees the ability to customize their landing page.

Using data that the platform already collects, it seemed like a no brainer — give the licensee a way to interact with data that we already collect. Make a modular dashboard powered by data widgets.

...then again maybe not.

After the first iteration of a data dashboard, I had to face the fact that a data driven dashboard wasn't a possibility. We would need to:

  • Design, build and test the first round of widgets

  • Design, build and test the widget settings panel

  • Design, build and test the desktop stats


Although the data is readily available, the functionality would take quite a bit of dev time. I went — ahem —back to the drawing board, to come up with a minimum viable product.

Arriving at the Admin Dashboard.

Second Round of Whiteboarding

Whiteboarding Round 2

This time around I used post-its as a way to list components and their parts. This gave me more flexibility during the low-fi mockup process.

With the problem already detailed, it would be easy to skip whiteboarding. I felt that it was necessary to start from the beginning because the first iteration hit so far from the mark.


Sometimes building the best possible product requires you to make some mistakes.

Even with my team on board to create a widget experience for our users, we had to back down from project of that size.


Making the best possible product required my team and I to be honest with ourselves about the time it would take to build widgets.


Home Page of Desktop Concept

Home Page of Mobile Concept