Data visualization reports for sales and marketing teams are informative. But, they are not the most helpful with the decision-making process.
A design lens was required to rectify this!
An overview:
We conducted a heuristic evaluation of the client's existing sales reports to understand the challenges these teams face.
My Role:
Stakeholder meetings
Heuristic Evaluation
Visual and UI Design
Wireframing
End-to-end dashboard design
The team
Senior Lead - Experience Designer
Lead - Experience Designer 1
Lead - Experience Designer 2
Tools used
Adobe XD
Microsoft Office
Collaborated with
Power BI developers
Tableau developers
Duration
1.2 years +
11
Countries (and counting)
across 4 continents had their reports designed and built by
the design team, as a part of
the SGI product initiative
30+
Stakeholders in the sales
and marketing teams were interviewed regarding their
data requirements on the dashboard for their country
50+
Sales and marketing
reports designed, standardized, unified by a design system,
validated for usability
and pushed for production
💡 The Project Brief:
TerraChem started an initiative named Sales Growth Information (SGI) for the Sales and Marketing team in their Agricultural Products vertical. The main idea behind the SGI ecosystem is to display dashboards with stakeholder-specific, dynamic, and summarised data. Redesign the dashboards in a unified manner and declutter the visuals to aid decision-making.
📦 The Deliverables:
- A design system that standardizes the UI of these
sales dashboards that can be used by the
developers to make new reports.
- A set of redesigned sales dashboards with
condensed, streamlined, and
stakeholder-relevant data
- Dashboards customized to each region
and market type.
​
The Business Problem
During our discovery meetings with the client, we uncovered some insights about the challenges TerraChem was facing in its sales and marketing teams navigating their reports and dashboards.
Sales and Marketing teams' unfamiliarity with data analytics results in slower dashboard interpretation
Team members found dashboards too
data heavy, hence delaying the decision making process
Many team members would retire in 3-4 years,
the learning curve while using the dashboards should be low
Different regions have different market structures
The Hurdles
- Convincing all the countries that were a part of the SGI
framework to tailor their dashboard requirements in
accordance with the framework.
​
- The dashboards are built on Power BI, a visualization tool
TerraChem uses. Our designs and design system should be
a consistent extension of TerraChem's band guidelines
across all tools used.
Here are the hurdles we faced as a
design team while we were navigating
the project cycle.
Power BI supports 7
typefaces, 9 visuals
per scroll, and a limited
set of data visuals.
According to market types, Terrachem wanted their dashboards built
in two pre decided models - Drill down
and Guided models
The Constraints
With every design project, comes a
set of constraints. These really made
us push our creativity to come up with
a foolproof design system and process
that met the client's expectations.
​
​
The Power BI developers had access to the client sales data. Hence, every design had to be run by the developers to verify data availability
Key Insights
After our heuristic evaluation, and client meetings, here are some insights that we discovered about the existing sales reporting dashboards
Inconsistent
visuals and colors,
and doesn't reflect
as a product of
TerraChem
Overcrowded
tables and graphs,
lack of emphasis on
which graph to
view first
Lack of filtering
options for viewing
data that is relevant
to a specific
stakeholder
No established
hierarchy of header,
footer, summary
or highlights of
information
The refined
problem
statement
How might we ensure that the sales and marketing dashboards are designed in accordance with best practices for user-friendliness, while also being compliant with Power BI requirements and consistent with the client's established brand guidelines?
The Visuals
This project is a WIP.
If you'd like to know more, please reach out to me!