Enroll & Pay offers integrated fintech services that enable merchants to boost customer loyalty, increase customer engagement, and drive business growth.
Opportunity
The company was in its growth stage, and with that came new challenges in better serving the needs of brick-and-mortar businesses. The current analytics dashboard for the sales platform lacked the flexibility and variation to effectively support merchants’ diverse goals, so the product team wanted to explore different ways of presenting data.
Results and Impact
I worked with the founders and development team in an agile environment.
I redesigned the analytics dashboard with enhanced data visualizations that made business performance metrics more digestible, leading to more informed and efficient decision-making.
The product team was happy with the new design, regarding it as “so amazing and a great step to move us forward”. Once built, my designs will be the focus of demos conducted with prospective businesses to encourage them to adopt the platform.
DEFINING GOALS
How Do We Scale to Fit Company Growth?
The sales reporting platform is unique in its integration of the loyalty program, which connects customer engagement with sales performance.
After several demos with prospective partners, the team learned that the reporting view needed a more dynamic layout.
As the company looked to grow its user base, my challenge was to address merchants' core reporting needs while also highlighting the value of customer loyalty in driving business growth.
RESEARCH
What Are the Opportunities for Improvement?
I facilitated discussions with stakeholders to learn more about our users, business owners and managers, their motivations for viewing metrics, and the kinds of goals they have for their businesses.
I also wanted to understand how the loyalty program could be used as a key performance indicator for businesses.
I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the entire platform to identify usability issues and help me understand the reporting view in the context of the whole experience.
There were several issues, such as vague labeling for data points, confusing color coding, and poor hierarchy, which made it difficult to understand what I was looking at.
Aggregating with User Needs
Some of the issues I uncovered were also pain points mentioned by our users, which provided additional validation. With my understanding of the kinds of performance indicators users are interested in, I felt confident about being able to map different pieces of data to the primary goals.
Key Insights
MAKING DECISIONS
What Are My Design Priorities?
In synthesizing research insights, I concluded that the current design required too much cognitive effort to be able to interpret how the business is performing, which can lead to users reading the data incorrectly or missing key insights altogether. I needed to determine how to best summarize the data for users who have some data literacy expertise.
- Improve the data storytelling.
- Present complex data in a way that is easy to read to make interpretations on performance more efficient and accurate.
- Compare member and non-member engagement to show the value of the loyalty program.
DESIGNS
How Do I Organize the Data?
To ensure I was following best practices, I looked at how other platforms leveraged data storytelling to drive the reporting view layout and data visualizations used.
From there, I took inventory of all the data points from the current solution and conversations with stakeholders and grouped the information into 4 key themes.
I worked closely with the team to brainstorm different ways of presenting the data.
ITERATING
How Can We Refine the Experience?
In my first iteration, I made the executive decision to omit those that the research did not identify as high-priority, since the original view included a lot of data points.
However, after presenting this initial version to the product team, we agreed to reintroduce some of that data through an additional visual component.
We also identified that the journey from non-members to new members to long-time members was important, so we needed to show those conversions.
HANDOFF
What’s the Final Solution?
By creating a dashboard layout that organized sections of content by merchants’ priority needs and moving from a flat layout to a card configuration, I felt that the new reporting view was much more engaging and intuitive.
Before handing off the designs to the developers, I provided guidelines and annotations for the components that were new to the design system to ensure interactions were implemented correctly.
Reflection
Challenges
This design process for the project was far from linear. I would often pause ideation and find that I had questions or assumptions about our users that felt too critical to ignore. Rather than push ahead, I went back to stakeholders to clarify key insights. This created delays and uncertainty, but I felt more confident that I was directly mapping pain points to user needs.
Because the original dashboard design had many different individual data points presented as text, it was difficult to determine what graphical representation would provide the best summary of information that merchants needed. However, I had a fun time playing around with the numbers, making calculations, and drawing visualizations.
What If…
I had a timeline of about a month before handoff, which left no time to have conversations with users or present the designs to them. Although the stakeholders and founders frequently interacted with users, I would have loved to get the chance to ask my own questions from a more UX focused perspective or even be a part of the demos.
The new solution did not allow for personalization, so it would have been interesting to explore a design that limited variability but used template components to allow users to select what visualizations were important to them. At the very least, this approach could be something to explore in the next iteration.
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