Executive Dashboard

The problem

"Why Can't I View My Facilities Maintenance and my Capital Planning Data Together?"

One of the primary complaints we heard at Accruent was that customers wanted to combine their data together into a single experience.    The goal of this project to was to create a proof of concept design for an integrated solution. 

Outcome of This Project

This design was featured prominently at Conferences and CAB events where it received significant interest and praise from customers.  This interest was enough for Leadership to agree to invest in cross product Business Intelligence tools.  The final project was a collaboration between several different product teams.

The process

Identify the Persona

Through feedback sessions with customers we identified that the primary Persona for this feature were Executive, Facilities Directors, and other "Leadership" Personas concerned with extracting salient facts and understanding quickly.  These personas have neither the time, nor the abilities, to search for the information themselves or create dashboards.

Consider the User

Give that our user was more of an Information Consumer type of Persona, the main goal of the project was to "Tell a story with the data", or "The user should be able to quickly extract the salient points in the data quickly and without too much interpretation".    

The dashboards were built in a prescribed, pre-defined way focused on the Persona's need rather than include this as part of a 'dashboard tool'.  It also has a "UI-less UX" where the UX experience  feels 'natural' rather than like a set of controls.

Iteration

We started with simple wireframes to test the information architecture, and slowly added more detail and interactivity as the design became more concrete.  We also validated each step with stakeholders and against the personas and requirements

The product

A Prescriptive Experience that is Informative and Easy to Consume 

The screens below show are representative of the design:

• Data from multiple sources is merged into a single dashboard.

• The navigation is also information (the tabs to change views are smaller representations of the full dashboard).

• Mix of different chart types, maps, and text to provide a holistic view of the information.

• Drill down at multiple levels.

• Minimal UI, most of the interaction and navigation is through directly interacting with the objects on the screen.