At the core of business intelligence is the need for people to be able to make data-driven decisions without the need to be certified analysts or developers.
The team behind the project realised that there was a space they could tackle and a solution they could create that didn’t require trainings and certifications.
The project kicked off with one specific goal — conceptualize the minimum viable product for a tool that would make data exploration intuitive for the whole team.
I jumped onboard initially as part of the product design team and then went on to coordinate the end-to-end design process, while collaborating hand-in-hand with product and engineering leadership.
This, later on, became the baseline of my collaboration with the team to drive the product’s growth after the first successful B2B collaborations.
To get at the core of what makes data exploration solutions frustrating and also vital to continue using, we interviewed with consultants, analysts, sales representatives and engineers and asked them about their workflow and day-to-day struggles and needs.
A defining marker of success for the product would be its ability to cater to a variety of thinkers and provide the necessary flexibility when manipulating and visualising data.
We zeroed in on a structure made solely from building blocks i.e components that could change and shift to different visualisations. People could use these components to build a bigger picture in a few clicks through a drag-n-drop dashboard.
We knew that not all data was meant for everybody and when it came to scaling access to the whole team, we needed to include the right tools to help manage sharing and permission controls.
We did a lot of prototyping to identify the structure for handling access at row, component and dashboard levels and further specify permissions for teams and individuals.
With the new opportunities and needs that surfaced along the way, we needed to make sure that the product would maintain its initial stand as an intuitive interface. We wanted to maintain a balance so that people wouldn’t get overwhelmed with the new features, but they would be able to find them if needed.
Whenever it was possible we ran user walkthroughs that helped us bridge the gaps on intuitiveness and discoverability.
As the product evolved into its more robust versions, it was important to get back to the foundations and establish a universal design system. We structured components, templates and guidelines through Sketch symbols, text styles, and color palettes to help the design and development teams work faster while maintaining strong consistency.
