Client
Salient Management Company
Role
User Experience Designer
Overview
Design a new feature for our existing dashboard product that was highly requested by users
Salient Dashboards - New Functionality
Overview
Working with the Salient dashboard product for several years and having a background in UX/UI, I was asked to come up with designs for a new feature that was often requested by clients. Out dashboard software is made up of dimensions, like categories and metrics, the data elements. Users wanted a way to create their own categories of data that they could customize.
Research & Requirements
I started this project with prior knowledge because of my experience working with the software. But one person’s opinions does not make for good design choices! I started internally at Salient by asking some of the healthcare subject matter experts and data analysts about their wants in a new custom category feature and for their pain points. From there I spoke with some of our external dashboard users who would be using this feature once it was created. Of the two groups, many of the responses and questions were similar.
Where will this feature exist in the current system?
Is it going to be hard to set up?
Will ‘custom groupings’ function as a regular dimension, or grouping?
Who can access this feature?
Goals
- Users want to be able to great custom groupings of categorical data
- To be able to treat customized groupings as a regular grouping so there are no limitations
- The interface and setup should be simple for users
- Users should be able to delete, edit and rename groupings easily
Pain Points
- When a new feature doesn't meet all my needs
- When something special is created for SDM (Salient dashboards) but it doesn't functional entirely
- When it takes many steps in order to set up what you want
Lastly I spoke with our engineering team to see if there were limitations I needed to know about. We also used the information from the interviews to come up with user stories.
Design Process
The last step of the research process and the beginning of the design process was speaking with the engineering team at would be creating the enhancements and bringing the new features to life. We used the information from user interviews as well as user support tickets to define use cases. At Salient it’s not uncommon for engineering to come up with these themselves, but by working together we were able to learn what our uses behaviors really were when using our software.
Whiteboarding
The next step was to get into a room and white board out some ideas. I started with 3 different variations of how I thought the new feature could be brought into the dashboard software. I brought in another designer at this point to discuss likes/dislikes and to bounce ideas off one another before moving onto wireframes.
Once I felt as if I had a grasp on exactly how the feature could work in several different ways and my user stories were appropriately met, it was time to create the wireframes. I mocked up 3 different scenarios that would be presented to the engineering team for further review. We discussed what worked, what didn’t work and whether or not the user cases and user asks were being met. After several small iterations we came up with final wireframes that engineering took to begin work on.
Mock Ups
Since this was an internal project, we never did high fidelity mock ups and felt as if this was an appropriate stop. The final design was presented to me and other high level Salient dashboard users to test out before it was rolled out to production clients. This was my first real world user experience project at a company in 2017/2018 and I absolutely loved it. It’s almost like growing a plant - you start with a seed, you tend and care for it and eventually it blossoms into a plant. We started with ideas from clients for a new feature and I researched and worked my way through figuring out how we could implement it. From there the designs were critiqued and iterated and finally brought to life by our engineering department. The whole process was exhausting but also fun and exciting.